


treatment plan

by beingjanee



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-05
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:53:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21681763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beingjanee/pseuds/beingjanee
Summary: After the island, John Watson disappears. He leaves behind a note, an empty wardrobe, and Rosie.Molly tries not to pick up the pieces.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/Molly Hooper
Comments: 90
Kudos: 366





	1. after

**Author's Note:**

> Basically, ignore the last ten minutes of S4E3. Imagine healthy boundaries being drawn. Then imagine those boundaries breaking all over again.
> 
> [Not beta'd. Please excuse any discrepancies, plot holes, or Americanisms. I did my best.]

They try to make it work, the three of them. 

After the island, John resumes life with the same steadfast expression that got him through a war. He goes to surgery and picks up where he left off at the practice. He even tries blogging again. Mostly, he looks after Rosie and tries not to think about anything at all. 

Mary’s still there, talking. She looks sad everytime he looks up. “You shouldn’t see me,” she says. “You shouldn’t still see me.” 

He does, anyways. 

He falls in the middle of the street twice, unable to rise on his shaking left leg. Sherlock is there the second time, rendered completely useless as John shouts for him to leave, to _go away_. A couple hours after they make it back to the flat, Sherlock wordlessly places a cane in front of the door. 

They try to go on cases together. Mrs. Hudson tells them with a broken laugh, “I’m your landlady, not a babysitter,” but they don’t smile at her. They hand the baby over and try to go on cases again. They try. 

Something has broken.

There are not many times when Sherlock feels completely helpless. He doesn’t like to admit it to anyone, not even in the privacy of his own skull, but having Mycroft as a brother has meant that he’s never truly been afraid of the consequences of anything. But now, there are consequences. 

John is the consequence.

They’re in the middle of a case, standing at a crime scene in some dusty flat in East London, when John abruptly leaves. He grabs his cane and limps through the police barricade, struggles briefly with the tape, and disappears into the night. Sherlock is momentarily at a loss, and then his pale face jerks towards the ground in defeat. Lestrade looks at him, his eyes sad. 

“I suppose this is how it feels,” Sherlock muses. “Whenever I walk away without explaining.” 

The guilt is so thick that Lestrade smells it, copper in the air. He clasps Sherlock’s shoulder with a gloved hand. “He just needs some more time. And...you’re going to have to accept that he’s never going to be the same. This,” he gestures around him, at the body, the police tape, the swarming forensics, “This is not going to be the same.”

Sherlock’s face is expressionless and he says nothing in response. Lestrade is often rendered stupid in Sherlock’s presence, to the point that he’s wondered privately what confidence he had to become detective inspector, but even he sees the subtle shift in Sherlock’s eyes. Even he knows what it means. 

It’s grief.

Sherlock lets go of something, something that John Watson left behind the moment Mary slumped back with her eyes still open, a bullet in her chest with Sherlock’s name on it. A small sigh escapes the consulting detective and he stumbles the slightest bit backwards. Lestrade’s hand is still on his shoulder, steadying him. 

The two men stand in the middle of the crime scene, listening to the police chatter and the quiet murmur of the forensics. Finally, Sherlock shrugs off Lestrade’s hand and heads back across the police tape.

Lestrade’s voice is quiet. “Sherlock.”

The detective doesn’t respond. He kneels next to the body with his glass and spits out a roster of observations. Lestrade watches him, remembering a time when the detective had snarled, “I’m a high-functioning sociopath,” as if it was an accolade.

“ _Emotions_ ,” he had said scathingly, “The grit in a sensitive instrument.”

Lestrade thinks it would have been a kindness if Sherlock’s disorder was real.

\--

John leaves behind a note, an empty wardrobe, and Rosie. 

_I’m sorry. I’ll try to be back soon._

Anthea comes with information about an overnight childcare facility, where Sherlock can leave Rosie until John comes back. Sherlock refuses to even open the door for her. He holds John Watson’s daughter and sits in his chair and watches the sun go down. 

They stay together, the two of them. 

\--

It’s the eleventh hour of a twelve-hour shift, and the weariness that’s become a constant for Molly is beginning to feel like a normal reaction, not a condition. 

She sips her coffee and stares dimly at the black figure in her doorway. She doesn’t think, she doesn’t realize, until he’s standing too close and it's too late for her to get out. 

They haven’t spoken to each other since the island. He left her a text message and she had heard a rough summary of what had happened — how terribly cliched, she thought, to have a secret mad sibling — but she never responded. 

It’s been weeks. He still hasn’t apologized.

Molly often feels stupid when she’s with Sherlock, but she’s not a stupid woman. She wouldn’t be here otherwise, working twelve-hour shifts with a medical degree in her name. She knows when to register a threat, when to observe a steady decline of someone’s well-being. She knows how to identify symptoms and potential causes, and how to provide a diagnosis. She knows how to prescribe a treatment, to make a treatment plan and tell someone to stick to it.

_Molly Hooper, stick to your treatment plan._

“Sherlock.” His name is cold on her lips. She stares up at him, ready to receive his request for an extra spleen, a fresh pair of lungs, her _fucking heart on a platter._ She readies herself to turn him away.

“Molly.” 

He’s thinner, which is a warning sign, but also clean shaven and tidily groomed. Molly tries to ignore the relief. At least he’s not here to ask her for a drug test — to ask her to _care_.

“May I sit down?” 

She waves a hand at the empty chair in front of her. She doesn’t offer him coffee. She waits. 

“You may be wondering about the events at Sherrinford, although I have no doubt that you’ve heard some version of it already. I must admit that it was difficult to realize that I not only had a forgotten sister, but that she was also a true, albeit misled, genius, beyond the intellectual capacity of anyone I’ve ever met —”

“Sherlock.” She sounds tired, even to herself. “Sherlock, I’m sorry but I really don’t care.”

Her voice is soft but she might as well have slapped Sherlock across the face. He flinches and stares at her, his lips thinning. 

“I suppose you already know the details, then.” 

Molly nods once. The two sit and say nothing, each waiting.

Molly knows Sherlock thinks she’s an idiot, but in that moment, as she watches Sherlock’s eyes dart from the table to her coffee mug to her face, she thinks that he is tremendously, utterly slow. 

Finally, he breathes in sharply. “I’m afraid...it seems like things are still not fine. Are they not fine?”

Molly slowly shakes her head. She’s still waiting. 

Sherlock’s face morphs into an expression that’s unfamiliar to Molly. She stares at him for a moment, her brow furrowed, before she realizes what it is. 

Confusion. He is completely baffled.

If it wasn’t Sherlock Holmes, she would have laughed. 

“Sherlock, I need you to apologize.”

The detective looks at her, his face pale under the fluorescent light. He’s still confused. 

“Why?” The word hangs between them. Molly feels something hot thrumming under her skin. 

“ _Why_?” Her voice rises. “Are you really asking me why you should apologize?”

Sherlock rears back, his face defensive. “I don’t understand. You know the details, you know why I asked you to say what you did, you know it was not intentional —”

“That is not the point!” She sounds shrill now. She thinks about her mother, her sister. She had called them shrill for being angry with the world, for being angry at men, and she thinks that she was mistaken. They were not shrill. They were enraged. 

“Sherlock, you hurt me. No matter what your intention was, no matter the circumstances, there was a consequence. And that consequence was on me, and me alone.”

“I thought she would kill you if I didn’t ask this of you. She had exhibited her ability to murder in cold blood, and it was purely logical that she would kill you if I didn’t completely debase myself with sentiment —”

“Debase yourself with sentiment? Are you serious?” 

“Molly.” Sherlock’s voice is flat. “I thought she was going to kill you. Your life is more important than anything else.”

They fall silent. Sherlock looks down and clears his throat, and for a moment, his face seems to fall apart. Then he looks up again, and he tells her, “John has left.”

Her ears are ringing. “What?"

“John. He’s gone away. He left a note saying he’s going to be gone for some time.”

It doesn’t sound true. John Watson would not leave Baker Street. He would not leave Sherlock Holmes, not unless it was absolutely necessary.

“I’m...I’m sorry,” she says. She doesn’t know what else to say. And then she looks at him, at the gaze that has suddenly turned hopeful, and she realizes why he’s here.

“Sherlock, I can’t do this.” She realizes with horror that her voice sounds wobbly, as if she’s about to break down into tears. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

She takes a moment to breathe, to keep her voice steady and her eyes dry. _Don’t be hysterical,_ she tells herself. _He won’t take you seriously if you’re hysterical._

“I can’t...I can’t do this anymore. I know why you did what you did and I know that I should be understanding, but this — this is starting to break me down, and I don’t know how to stop it.”

Her eyes are watery, she can tell, but she still fixes her stare on the man in front of her. “If you’ve come here to ask me to be there for you, I’m so sorry, but I can’t. It...it wasn’t real to me until I said it to you. And now...you won’t understand, but it is really, really painful to love someone who will never love you back.” 

Her voice shudders. Her heart, bloody and open, is on the table between them. She stares at it through red-rimmed eyes, wondering how it would feel if she took a scalpel to it. She looks up.

He’s staring at her and she resists the urge to rub the heels of her palms into her eyes, to wipe away the tears and the exhaustion and the bright glare of his stare. He says nothing for a moment, and then he hands her his handkerchief. 

“I do understand.” His voice is low. “I am sorry, Molly. Truly.”

He gives her a nod, brushes the smallest touch on her shoulder, and leaves.

Molly waits for her shift to end before she goes to her locker and sobs her heart into her coat.

\--

Sherlock Holmes sits alone in an empty flat. 

_I can’t do this. I can’t do it anymore._

It was like a badly written script. One with repeating lines, by a writer who never knew their own characters. He traces the words on John’s note, and hears them spoken through Molly’s lips. 

He rocks Rosie to sleep and feels the world continue to turn on its axis.

\--

There’s a strange black car in front of Molly’s flat. She’s been watching it since noon and it hasn’t moved. She’s fairly sure it’s parked in a towing zone, but there’s no ticket on the windshield, no outraged shop owner or foreman banging on its windows and yelling at it to park somewhere else. 

She wouldn’t have noticed on any other day, but today’s her day off. She was planning on staying inside and watching telly and eating a terrible tray dinner. She was planning it, but the car is still there, and there’s a dreadful tug of intuition that makes her feel sick.

At 6 o’clock in the evening, she emerges from the building in a thick sweater, her arms tightly wrapped around herself. As she approaches the car, the window rolls down. 

“Good evening,” says the woman inside, her voice pleasant. 

Molly is hesitant. She was expecting a man, someone she’s only seen a few times, each time in passing. Tall, thin-ish, balding. 

“Are you...did Mycroft send you?”

The woman laughs, her red lips peeling back from white teeth. “Something like that.”

She types something into her phone, still smiling. Molly bites her lip, feeling foolish. Of course Mycroft would send an assistant. A man like him would hardly sit and wait in front of her flat for a full day. 

Then again, a man like him would hardly send an assistant in a car and waste valuable time waiting for anyone. Molly’s flat is guarded by a pitiful little lock and little else. She thinks about all of the times she walked in to see Sherlock passed out on her couch, or baiting Toby with the bow of his violin, or eating the entire contents of her fridge. 

Something tells her that Mycroft Holmes acting out of the ordinary is not a good sign.

The woman looks up at her, turning her head slightly. There’s something sharklike in her beautiful face. “Have you seen Sherlock?”

Molly’s heart sinks. 

The day she met Sherlock for the first time, the day he swept in and demanded to see if there was an extra pair of smoker’s lungs he could borrow, she had switched shifts with someone else. Natalie was never very punctual, and on that day, she had texted Molly frantically asking for a favor. 

Molly almost said no. Molly _wishes_ she had said no. There’s another version of her out there, a version of Molly who never met Sherlock, who’s living a peaceful life, who doesn’t instinctively assume that the mysterious black car outside her flat is for her because of Sherlock Holmes.

The woman smiles and the shark in her face retreats a bit. There’s some sympathy there.

“I’ve been told that you might want to go see him.”

Molly closes her eyes, her skull suddenly heavy. She shakes her head. “No. No, I don’t. I was clear about that.”

The woman looks at her for a moment. Her eyes are dark against the paleness of her face, and they seem to burrow under Molly’s skin. 

“I’m afraid there’s no one else,” she says. “You’re the godmother, aren’t you?”

Molly’s heart almost stops. “What?”

The woman raises an eyebrow. “Rosamund Watson’s godmother. That’s you.” At Molly’s continued silence, she raises both eyebrows. “Oh, I see. You didn’t know. He didn’t take his daughter with him.”

Molly coughs out her answer. “Rosie...is alone? With Sherlock?”

The woman smiles at Molly like she’s a child who’s just understood a basic concept. “Yes, that’s right.” 

The weariness, briefly alleviated for her day off, is back in full force. It settles comfortably around Molly’s shoulders. She hears the words, echoing through an empty hospital corridor on Christmas Day, all those years ago.

 _Caring is not an advantage._

“Has Mycroft done anything about this?”

The woman closes her eyes, as if trying to block out something unpleasant. “No, I don’t think so. Sherlock won’t let him in. He won’t let anyone in.”

Molly Hooper is not a stupid woman. Mycroft could send in an entire battalion to 221B if he tried. Molly thinks about the lock on the 221B door, as flimsy as her own. Forget the militia — Mycroft could just break in with a twist of his umbrella. 

But he won’t. That’s not a good sign.

“She is also _your_ goddaughter,” the woman says pointedly, looking back down at her phone.

Molly wants to shake her. She thinks about spinning on her heel and leaving without another word. Packing a suitcase, flying to Guam. She could live there for a while. Guam needs coroners, surely. 

“Alright,” she concedes. “Alright.”

\--

The bell rings. It rings four times, and then the door to 221B creaks open.

It’s been a long time since Molly’s been here. After John married, their little band of misfits had shifted away from 221B and met more at John and Mary’s place. Sherlock had never ceased to complain about it, but anything was better than opening the fridge to a decomposing head. 

The air is stale with dust. The door to Mrs. Hudson’s flat is closed, the lights off. Molly’s stomach sinks a little. She had been hoping for a buffer.

Molly steps up the stairs and raps the door gently, her fingers cold against the wood. 

“Sherlock?” 

The door’s unlocked. It swings forward as if in invitation. 

The flat is as silent as a tomb. Even the roar of the traffic on the street below seems unable to penetrate the dead quiet. Everything is covered in a faint layer of dust, the air damp and molding. Under the mold is the powdery smell of formula and freshly changed nappies.

It’s too quiet.

Molly tries not to walk too fast. She doesn’t barge in. Like with the past two doors, she knocks politely, even with her heart in her throat. “Sherlock?”

No answer. She turns the knob. It jams. Locked.

“Sherlock?” The desperation rises with the pitch of her voice. “Sherlock!”

She rattles the doorknob again. Oh _Christ_.

Of course it was her, of course she had to be the one to find him. It had to be _her._

“I swear to god, Sherlock Holmes!”

The door swings open. A cry pierces the air.

Sherlock Holmes, half dressed with sick on his expensive slacks, is holding a baby against his shoulder. He looks incredibly displeased.

“You woke the baby.”

Molly debates punching him then. A sharp hook to the nose would break it at this distance. Her dad taught her when she was nine, folding her hand into a fist. The thumb should be on the outside, he said. If the thumb is under the rest of the fingers, the force of the blow might break it. 

Instead, she takes the child. Its face is red from the screaming, but the cry itself is weak and hoarse. Molly listens, concerned. She feels the baby’s forehead.

“Sherlock.”

The detective is back inside his bedroom, digging through piles of clothing for a shirt. He straightens and shrugs on a dress shirt, leaving it unbuttoned. Molly coos at the baby, patting it on the back, and stares at Sherlock’s torso. She can count the ribs.

“When was the last time you ate?”

Sherlock looks down at his ribcage, a finger tracing over the skin. He scowls at it and buttons his shirt. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

Molly closes her eyes, her hand smoothing down Rosie’s back. No, it doesn’t. It shouldn’t. It’s not her business anymore.

She feels Rosie’s forehead again. “Sherlock, the baby has a fever.”

The detective doesn’t react, but his face grows paler. He just stares at Rosie, his eyes bright.

“I...I thought that might be the case. But I wasn’t sure.”

His eyes dart from the baby to Molly. He’s trying not to look helpless, she knows. He makes a move to take the child from her but she takes a step back. 

“No. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

His eyes are too bright. He hasn’t been eating. There’s a red flush on his neck. Molly wonders how many new marks she’ll see once she rolls up his sleeve and takes a closer look at his arm.

He sees her looking. 

“I haven’t,” he hisses, his voice guttural. Molly’s eyes snap back to his face. In its gaunt state, Sherlock’s face looks even more reptilian. 

“I haven’t,” he says again. “I would never, not with the baby.”

He’s lied before. She knows this. But she pats Rosie and nods slowly, her eyes never leaving his face. 

She reaches out a hand.

Sherlock’s eyes close as her cool fingers stroke across his brow. He’s burning up. A sick man with a sick baby. Molly wants to throw something, wants to shove the baby back into his arms and march out of this godforsaken flat. She wants to never see Sherlock Holmes again. 

She draws her hand back sharply. Instead of marching out, she asks the obvious question.

“Where is Mrs. Hudson?” 

The baby is quieting down, falling asleep on her shoulder. Sherlock leans against the doorway, his face creasing in exhaustion. “Funeral. In Florida. She’s been gone for a week. Won’t be back until next month.”

Molly shakes her head in disbelief. “She trusted you with the baby?”

Sherlock fixes his gaze on her face. “I am a grown man. There’s no reason not to trust me.”

Molly tries not to roll her eyes. In theory, he’s absolutely right. There’s no reason a grown adult shouldn’t be able to care for a newborn. There’s no reason a woman is especially needed for child care. As far as she knows, Mrs. Hudson never had children. There’s no reason she should be better at taking care of a baby than Sherlock Holmes.

Except, he’s Sherlock Holmes.

Molly stands and fumes a little, at Sherlock and Mrs. Hudson and the mysterious woman. She fumes about John Watson. At the end of it all, his disappearance has caused this. He abandoned his own child (and Sherlock) and left her to pick up the pieces, unknowingly or not. 

“What about childcare? You could have hired someone. Or you could have called me. I’m her godmother, you didn’t need to take this on yourself.”

Sherlock stares at her. Something in his jaw tightens and his eyes flicker over to John’s chair.

Molly is not a stupid woman. She’s spent almost five years working in the same lab as this man. Staring at him from afar, daydreaming, preening, but also observing. Her observations might not be as quick as Sherlock Holmes, but that doesn’t mean she’s stupid.

“If you think this is how you’re going to be able to pay penance —”

She stops. Her voice is too sharp. The baby squirms in her arms, her face crinkling in anger and discomfort. She immediately holds Rosie closer, rocking her slightly and shushing her. 

“Molly.”

Sherlock’s voice is soft. He’s staring at the child, but his attention is on her. Entirely on her.

“Why are you here?”

He sounds tired, about as tired as she feels. Molly wants to sink through the floor, all the way to the ground, and be buried under this house. She wants the comforting weight of soil on top of her. She thinks she could sleep for years if she tried.

She feels the baby’s head again. “We need to go to a hospital. For both of you. A fever is dangerous for a baby this young. And you look like you’re going to keel over any second.”

Sherlock considers her for a moment. She’s afraid that he’s not going to let this go, that he’ll demand answers from her before they go anywhere, but suddenly, he’s pushing himself off the doorway. He grabs his coat from the peg and a baby blanket from the bed. 

“Wrap her in this,” he instructs as he packs a small bag with nappies and formula.

Molly does as he says. She vaguely remembers learning how to swaddle in a home ec course. She remembers laughing loudly with her friends, declaring that she would never have children.

Rosie, bless her soul, doesn’t wake. The baby sleeps the whole way to the hospital, even when the taxi driver curses loudly at an abrupt lane change, even as he coos at the baby and reassures her “mummy and daddy” that the baby will be fine.

Molly and Sherlock exchange a glance, but they say nothing. 

\--

“You’re not this child’s legal guardian?”

Molly shakes her head. “No, but I’m her godmother. Her father is...occupied with something else, and he left her with us for the time being.” 

The nurse gestures to Sherlock. “And this is your husband?”

Molly refuses to look at the man next to her. “No.”

The nurse raises her eyebrows. “But you said he’s been taking care of her? That’s where her fever is from?”

Molly flushes. God, she’s tired.

“Well, yes. Sorry. Um, he is taking care of her, because he’s her godfather. But we’re not married. We’re just…”

Just what? What in the world could she say they were? 

“Friends.” Sherlock’s voice is quiet. He hasn’t spoken a word since they arrived at the pediatric ward. His eyes are still too bright.

The nurse’s expression is still slightly suspicious as she jots down their names on the clipboard. “How long has she had this fever?”

Molly hesitates. “I—I don’t know.” She looks at Sherlock. 

Sherlock looks down at the floor. “I’m also not sure. I wasn’t aware...we weren’t aware that she had a fever until today.”

The nurse hides her appalled expression fairly well, but it slips through in her voice. “I see.” She scribbles something else down. 

“Well, we’ll see what the doctor says when he comes in. The mother — sorry, the godmother, can stay with the baby until he gets here. Mr. Holmes, you should follow me.”

Sherlock doesn’t move. He just looks at the nurse, who’s already halfway down the corridor. She turns when she realizes he’s not following and gives him a baleful look. 

“Mr. Holmes, you also have a fairly high fever and a bad cough. We need to make sure it’s nothing serious. Also, it’s not a good idea to keep exposing you to the baby.”

He looks at Rosie and then at Molly. “I’ll be back.”

Molly nods. She tries not to notice, but as he walks down the corridor with the nurse, she sees the gap in the shoulders of his coat, almost as if the man inside is shrinking. Disappearing.


	2. new normal

Molly was fifteen when her dad died. Stomach cancer, the kind that goes unnoticed until a bad spout of indigestion. He was given four weeks and then he was gone. 

There was a stillness in the house when she returned from the funeral. It hadn’t been there immediately after his death, even as she watched the paramedics wheel the body from the sitting room. It was only after the funeral, when her father was fully buried, that it felt like something had left. 

There’s no real way to measure a person’s presence until they’re gone. It’s not as if they’ve left behind a physical hole — nothing so dramatic. It was merely the absence. Her father was there and then he was not.

“Don’t worry,” he grinned from his deathbed. She remembers his face, papery white and as translucent as the tubes sticking out of him. “I’m not going anywhere.”

 _Liar_ , she thinks, when she steps back into 221B, when she sees John’s empty chair. _Liar, liar._

\--

It’s pneumonia, or about to be. The doctor recommends that Sherlock stay overnight. He needs an IV drip, something to replenish his vitamins and rehydrate him. Molly suspects that the doctor also saw the marks on his arm.

“Would it be possible for you to bring him an overnight bag?” the doctor asks, filling out a prescription for antibiotics. Molly almost says no. Sherlock is a grown man, and she’s already in charge of a new infant.

“You’re his friend, aren’t you?” The doctor rips the prescription note from the pad and hands it to her. 

She’s a doctor as well. She knows when someone is unwell, when she’s unwell. She knows how to diagnose, how to treat, how to make a plan to get better. This is not part of that plan. 

“Yes. I’ll bring a bag.” She takes the prescription note and starts to gather her things. Rosie gets wrapped tight against her chest, her head resting against the bone of Molly’s sternum.

Sherlock is awake when Molly comes back. She doesn’t realize his eyes are open until she’s placing his phone on the table next to his bed. 

“Any new texts?” he asks.

Molly jolts a little but keeps her expression calm. “Not that I saw,” she says. 

He nods slightly, his eyes peering around her. “Where’s the baby?” 

Molly is unpacking his bag — a new dress shirt, a pair of trousers that don’t have sick on them. His antibiotics, his scarf. 

“I left her with the nurses at the pediatric ward. She’s still running a little bit of a fever, so they’re giving her a sponge bath.”

Sherlock nods again. His face is almost as white as the pillow behind his head, and Molly realizes that he might be more ill than she thought. Penance, she thinks. 

“Molly.” His voice stops her. She turns back from the door, her hand leaving the handle. 

“Why did you come today?”

She thinks about the note she left on his bed, the white paper standing out from the stained navy bedspread. She’d hoped he would be asleep. She’d hoped she could continue her treatment plan.

She steps back towards the bed, gingerly sitting on the hard stool next to it. 

“I met someone.”

A corner of Sherlock’s mouth goes up. “Congratulations.”

Molly flushes, her gaze dropping down to her hands. “No! No, that’s not what I meant. I…a woman came to my flat. A few days ago. She didn’t tell me who she was, but...she told me I should see you. She told me that you were alone with Rosie.”

Sherlock’s eyes are brighter now. He’s staring at her with something of his former intensity. “Was she with Mycroft?” 

Molly winces a little. “No.”

Sherlock keeps staring. “No, he wasn’t in the car with her or no, she’s not from Mycroft?”

He’s angry. He’s pale and his nostrils are flared and he looks like he might snap something. Molly sighs. “No, he wasn’t in the car.”

Sherlock stays silent. The quiet is unending. Molly hears the steady drip of his IV and the hum of the fluorescent lighting, and she says nothing. It’s not her problem. If the brothers are fighting, then the best thing she can do is take Rosie and leave them to it.

They’re both adults. She doesn’t need to feel responsible for Sherlock Holmes and he doesn’t need to feel responsible for her. There is no reason for them to be tied to each other. 

Molly rises. “I’m going to take Rosie. You can’t handle her right now, that’s obvious. I hope you feel better.”

Sherlock’s hand jerks, as if he’s about to grab the end of Molly’s cardigan. His face tightens and he lowers his hand, and he continues to say nothing.

Molly doesn’t apologize. She thinks about her treatment plan. She leaves.

\--

There’s very little that she remembers about Moriarty.

Her therapist said that was natural. Her brain took the trauma and compartmentalized it, so she doesn’t have to confront it on a regular basis. Molly doesn’t know how to voice the fact that what frightens her the most is that she _wasn’t_ traumatized. Nothing happened — what she doesn’t remember is Moriarty himself. 

He left her alive. That frightens her too.

They had sex once, after a night in front of the telly. She initiated it, Sherlock’s scathing glance pounding in her head. It was like Moriarty knew what bothered her, and when he came inside her, his moaning low and guttural in her ear, she thought defiantly: _not gay._

He hadn’t been aggressive. He was quiet. He was soothing. He did very little to be remembered. He was like any other man. 

How could she trust anyone after that?

She thinks it’s why she never quite learned how to let go of Sherlock, even after she got engaged and told everyone that she had moved on. She wasn’t _in_ love with him, not exactly. But he was so reliably different, so strange, and he never, ever compromised. She could trust that. 

And then he made her tell him she loved him, and he became so much more ordinary after that.

\--

Babies are god awful creatures. Molly’s forgotten.

“And how in the world is this helping you?” her sister asks. She sits on the floor, casting a dismayed glance at the tornado of nappies and baby clothes strewn around her. 

“Not everything has to be transactional,” Molly mumbles as she spoons another terrible mashed pea concoction into Rosie’s mouth. 

It’s not the first time she’s taken care of Rosie, but it is the first time she’s become wholly responsible. Other times, there was Mrs. Hudson, even Greg at times, and Mary was always helpful in providing instructions and extra nappies, but this time, there’s nothing. No one.

“What about the godfather? You can’t be the only one responsible.”

Molly clenches her jaw. Rosie chokes down the peas and squeals in delight — or maybe in horror. 

“He’s not around.”

Lizzie looks up from her tabloid. “What do you mean? He’s the detective, the Holmes one, isn’t he?”

“Yeah. He’s...otherwise occupied.”

Lizzie lets out a scornful laugh. “Typical. They think just because we’re women, we need to be the ones doing all of the cleaning and the baby-rearing—”

“Lizzie.” Molly sounds tired, even to herself. She can feel the corners of her lips drooping. “Can you please not? Not today.”

Her older sister scoffs again but stays quiet as Molly rises with the baby, rocking her back and forth. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay with her? I am really sorry —”

Lizzie flaps a hand towards her. “Don’t start with the guilt. You asked and I said yes, so there’s nothing more to it. Besides, it’s only for a few weeks. The baby’s father is coming back?”

The lie comes to her easily. “Yes. Yes, he is.” 

Lizzie gets up and takes the baby from her. “You should go in and get some sleep. You look like a corpse.”

Molly starts to protest, but her head really does feel heavy, and she really does feel like she might collapse at a moment’s notice — perhaps it wouldn’t hurt…

\--

It’s dark when she wakes. Molly fumbles for a moment, bleary and confused and panicked about the time. She thinks for a moment that it’s early morning, before the sun has risen, and she has to get to Bart’s for her shift with Rosie in tow.

There’s a dim glow of yellow light spilling in from under the door. Molly blinks and sits up, peering at the red light of her alarm clock. It’s only been a few hours since she fell asleep, nearly dinner time.

Someone’s laughing outside her door. 

“Liz?” Molly pulls her hair into a low ponytail and pushes her sweater back down to her waist as she steps out of her bedroom. The telly is on, someone is talking, and the flat is warm. It feels more lived in than it has in a long time. It makes her feel better.

And then she steps into the sitting room and sees Sherlock Holmes, still pale and ramrod thin, holding Rosie on the sofa. 

They stare at each other as Lizzie bustles in, holding a tray. “Molly, you told me the godfather was busy!” She places a saucer in front of the detective and looks up at Molly, beaming. 

“There was a number on the fridge for a Mr. Sherlock Holmes, so I called it. I thought why not? He should know how his goddaughter’s doing.”

Molly closes her eyes for a second. “There was a number on my fridge?”

Liz flushes. “Well, no. Not exactly on the fridge.”

Molly opens her eyes and looks at her sister. “Then where?”

Sherlock suddenly makes himself very busy with Rosie. Lifting her, he takes a sniff and says lightly, “She seems to need a change, I'll just —”

“Alright! I Googled him. I typed in ‘detective holmes’ and his website popped up with his phone number. It wasn’t very difficult.”

Liz flops down onto the sofa, fixing a glare on the detective. 

“I just thought it was absolutely unfair that Molly has to take care of the baby entirely on her own, when there’s a perfectly good godfather who can help. You do realize, Mr. Holmes, that Molly is employed in a hospital, and you’re a freelancer?”

Molly takes ten deep calming breaths. “Liz, I told you, Sherlock is a busy —”

Her sister lets out a derisive splutter. “Jesus Christ, Molly, have some respect for yourself. You have a job — you’re a doctor. You can’t take care of a baby on your own like this. And I know you asked for my help and I’m happy to give it to you, but we both know that this can’t last forever and just because you’re a woman shouldn’t mean —”

_“For once in your life, Liz, would you fucking listen to me?”_

Molly wishes she could bottle the silence that follows and step into a pool of it. Absolute blissful silence. 

And then Sherlock speaks.

“I should go,” he says quietly, his voice deeper than normal. He lifts Rosie and places her carefully against a cushion. “I’m sorry. When I received the call, I thought I should come by, just in case. I was...worried.”

Molly sighs a little. It’s as if she hasn’t taken a nap at all.

“No, I’m sorry. We made you come all the way here.”

Sherlock nods, shrugging on his coat and pulling his scarf around his neck. He pauses at the doorway. “Look, Molly.” He hesitates again. “I am more than willing to help. You shouldn’t do this alone. But I understand if you...if that’s not what you want.”

Molly doesn’t know how to respond, so she just nods and watches as Sherlock Holmes leaves her flat, his footsteps growing fainter in the corridor. In the corner of the sofa, Rosie babbles some nonsense.

“Honestly, Molly, what is going on?”

Liz’s voice is concerned, and at any other time, it might bring tears to Molly’s eyes, but she just wants everything to stop. She shakes her head and sinks to the carpet. 

“I can’t talk about this, Liz. Not now. I’m sorry.”

Her older sister watches her for a moment, her face awash in the golden light of the room. And then she steps towards Molly and grabs her by the arms and leads her back into the bedroom, her touch gentle.

“Go back to bed. I’ll take care of Rosie.”

Molly nods gratefully. When had this become the new normal? She’s too tired to think, too tired to do anything but sink back into bed and dream about a beating, bloody heart on a slab. 

\--

The steps to Molly Hooper’s treatment plan:

  1. Get Sherlock to apologize. 
  2. Maintain healthy boundaries. 
  3. Let emotional distance naturally dissolve the relationship. 
  4. Find someone new and forget, forget, forget.



She should have known that the plan would be a failure.

Bouncing Rosie on her hip, she wonders what constitutes a healthy boundary. It’s true that Sherlock has stopped coming to the lab, at least when she’s there. He doesn’t come by her flat, he doesn’t call or text or leave her any kind of message. The mysterious woman and the mysterious black car are nowhere to be seen. 

But here’s Rosie, an undeniable breach in the boundary.

Life resumes something like normalcy. She works at the lab and leaves Rosie with Liz or at childcare, and she tries to minimize her hours as much as possible. She ignores the dirty glances from her colleagues and gestures helplessly when she can’t take someone else’s shift. She doesn’t tell anyone about the baby. She doesn’t tell anyone that John Watson has disappeared.

The exhaustion is always there, even when she gets a prescription and sleeps like she’s dead for eight hours. She wonders if she should cut back on caffeine, and suffers for one entire miserable week before deciding that life with caffeine is infinitely better than life with sleep.

It’s the baby, she decides. Being abruptly in charge of a child that’s not even hers is taking its toll. She feels immediate guilt when she thinks this, and comes home to shower Rosie in kisses. At least she’s safe, Molly thinks. At least she’s okay.

She doesn’t know if she could say the same for anybody else. 

Liz has left for the evening when someone knocks at her door. Molly is dozing on the sofa, Rosie nestled in the crook of her arm. She jerks awake, something in her gut making her instantly anxious.

Placing Rosie in her crib, she stands by the door, her voice cautious. “Who is it?”

“Molly, it’s me. Greg.”

There’s relief and slight surprise and something else that she doesn’t want to think about, that she doesn’t even want to name. She thinks about anything but Sherlock and opens the door. “Hi, Greg.

The detective inspector gives her an uneasy smile as she gestures for him to step into the sitting room. Rosie is babbling in her crib and Lestrade’s face changes into fondness as he approaches her.

“She’s grown a bit, hasn’t she?”

He leans over the crib, stretching a hand towards the baby. Molly turns the kettle on and sets two mugs down on the counter. 

“Yeah, she really has. John is missing a lot.”

Greg doesn’t look at her, but his shoulders slump visibly. He clears his throat. “Yeah, I can see that.”

Molly says nothing else as she lifts the whistling kettle and pours them both tea. She offers Greg his mug. 

“Ta, thanks.” They sit on the sofa and the silence stretches between them. 

“Look, Molly,” Greg finally says. “I know that things aren’t good right now. And Rosie...well, John’s left a right mess.”

Molly waits. 

“So just know that I’m here. I can’t promise a lot, I’m sorry, but I’ll help where I can.”

She turns her head towards him, the surprise evident on her face. She blinks. “Oh. Oh, right. Thanks, Greg.”

The man smiles. “Don’t look so surprised. I know I seem fairly useless, but I can watch the odd baby every now and then.”

Molly laughs and it feels nice. She realizes that she hasn’t laughed properly in quite some time. 

She shakes her head. “Am I that obvious?”

Greg sips from his mug. “Well, no. You don’t make it obvious. But I’ve seen you around the lab these few weeks and you look absolutely terrible. No offense. Have you been sleeping at all?”

Molly closes her eyes and breathes out deeply. “I’ve been trying. I’ll take naps and I do occasionally sleep for a full night. But...I don’t know. It’s not only because of Rosie.”

Greg doesn’t look up from his mug, but there’s something about the grim set in his jaw that tells her he’s been expecting this answer. “I see.” He pauses, and then sighs. “I suppose I came to talk about this too.” 

Molly’s heart sinks. Ah, there it was. 

“Have you seen Sherlock recently?”

She could flip a table. She could throw something. She wonders why she doesn’t. She wants so badly for everyone to know how angry she is, how terrible she is, how she’s on a  _ goddamn treatment plan.  _

Why in the world did ninety percent of her interactions with people begin and end with Sherlock Holmes? 

“No, I haven’t.” Her voice is cold. She gulps down the rest of her tea and rises. “I think it’s time for Rosie to sleep.”

Greg sits with his mouth gaping slightly open. He looks from her to the tea and then to Rosie. Slowly, he raises a hand to his hair and ruffles the back of his head.

“Oh, okay. I see.” He gets up too, setting the mug on the table. “Uh, it’s been good seeing you, Molly. Again, let me know if I can help. Really.”

She nods, her lips drawn tight. Tired.  _ Tired, tired, tired.  _

“Molly.” Lestrade is at the door, a hand on the knob. “I know it’s not my place. And God knows you’ve done enough for him, and you deserve to move on if you want to. But...Sherlock isn’t doing well. I know he’s not. And there’s not a lot of people who can be there for him the way you’ve been. It’s not fair to you, I know.”

He falls silent. He looks down at the floor, his shoulders heavy and his sigh deep. “I’m sorry, Molly. You don’t deserve this.”

He opens the door, gives her one last sad smile, and leaves.

\--

The door to 221B is locked. 

She rings the bell twice and thinks about turning back, going home. It’s not worth it. A part of her is still screaming at herself for coming here, Rosie swaddled to the front of her chest. 

_ You’re on a treatment plan. What about the treatment plan? Healthy. Boundaries. _

_ Shut up _ , she thinks. 

She rings the bell once more and then turns to leave, when the door creaks. A thin, waiflike man is staring at her through the small crack of space between the door and the doorway, his blue eye bulging at her. She unconsciously takes a step back, a hand covering Rosie’s head.

“Who’re you?” he demands.

She stammers. “I...sorry, is Sherlock in? Is he okay?”

The man opens the door a little wider. “Mr. Holmes? Who’s asking?”

Molly stares at the grubby hand wrapped around the plank of the door, the stained sweater that smells like chemicals. The man is the opposite of well-groomed; he looks homeless.

_ Oh, Jesus. _

Ignoring the man, she pushes the door open and heads up the stairs. Rosie squeals against her chest in protest at the sudden barrage of movement, but Molly only stops when she shoves the door open to the flat. 

Sherlock is shuddering against the carpet, wrapped in his blue dressing gown. One sleeve is pushed up and the marks are clear against his pale skin. He’s sweating his life out on the floor. 

“You  _ goddamn  _ idiot.” 

“Now that’s not very nice.”

The man has followed up behind her, his movements slow and jerky. He watches her, his eyes huge against his skull. She’s reminded of a praying mantis, with his long limbs and dead stare. 

“How could you have let him get to this state?” She remembers the man now. Wigs, Wiggins. Something strange like that. She met him once at the lab, when John had dragged in Sherlock to get tested after finding him in a drug den. 

“He’s fine. He’s had worse dosages.”

She turns and kicks him in the shin.

As he’s howling, she dials for an ambulance and kneels next to Sherlock, putting a finger over his pulse. As she touches his neck, his eyes flutter open and he stares at her, bleary but lucid.

“Molly?”

He blinks at her and then at the baby, and all of a sudden, he’s horrified.

“What are you doing here? What is she doing here?”

He struggles to get up, hissing curses. Wiggins stares at the two of them balefully. 

“She just pushed her way in. Do you know her, Mr. Holmes?”

“The two of you have met, you idiot,” Sherlock snaps. “At the lab.”

Wiggins fixes his dead eyes on Molly again, and then something clears in his face. “Oh. The girl doctor from the lab. I didn’t recognize you. You didn’t have a baby last time. And you don’t have your coat on.”

Molly wants to kick him again, but she’s standing now and examining the kitchen. Everything stinks of chemicals. 

“You’re running a meth lab,” she observes. “Are you determined to kill yourself, Sherlock?”

He doesn’t reply. He just looks at her, his hair matted flat onto his head, a week’s worth of whiskers covering his face. It strikes her that this is no longer an unfamiliar sight. 

“Where’s your list?” She starts to lift piles of rubbish, sifting through empty petri dish trays and bills marked from four months ago. Sherlock watches her, rising slowly from his position on the floor. 

“You look exhausted,” he remarks. Something like concern crosses his face. “Are you not sleeping?”

Molly feels a very strong, insane urge to laugh. He’s sitting in the cesspool of a drug-induced high, and he’s worried about  _ her _ ?

“You promised. You said you’d keep off it, after last time.”

Last time. Last time, when he was trying to save John Watson by destroying himself.

“When have I ever kept a promise?” The detective laughs darkly. He gestures towards Rosie. “You should leave. The fumes are not good for a baby.”

Molly ignores him and starts to go through his drawers. “Where is your list, Sherlock?”

Sherlock sighs. He reaches a pale hand into the front pocket of his dressing gown and brings out a crumpled piece of paper. He holds it away from her. “This isn’t for you.”

Molly grits her teeth. “Then where’s Mycroft? Why is your brother not taking care of you?”

Sherlock glares at her. “I am not a child. My brother is not my caretaker.”

“How can you possibly say you’re not acting like a child? You’re destroying yourself because things aren’t going your way, because you can’t take responsibility —”

“ _ I tried to take responsibility! _ You took Rosie, you didn’t trust me. What else am I supposed to do, wait around for you or John to come back and give your approval? I have respected your wishes and left you alone, no one asked you to come and check —”

“People are coming to me all the time to tell me that they’re worried about you, that there’s no one else to take care of you, as if it’s somehow my responsibility —”   


“No one asked you to be responsible —”

“MR. HOLMES!”

The baby is crying. Wiggins is standing between them, a hand outstretched towards Molly. His huge eyes blink at her as if in reproach. 

Molly is shaking with anger, but she shushes Rosie and says nothing else as the ambulance arrives. Before the EMTs can sweep into the building, Sherlock slams the door shut and steps out to meet them on the curb. Out the window, Molly watches as Sherlock gesticulates wildly before an EMT grabs him by the arm and forces him into the ambulance. The vehicle drives off, sirens wailing.

“Dr. Hooper,” Wiggins says. “It’s Dr. Hooper, isn’t it? I remember now.”

Leaning against the doorway to the kitchen, he wags a finger at her. “I’ve never seen him get so angry. He’s usually just somewhat cross.”

Molly closes her eyes. “Mr. Wiggins.”

The man chortles. “Mr. Wiggins, she says. Like I’m an old man. Just call me the Wig.” 

Molly opens her eyes and glares. “Mr. Wiggins. I’m going to ask for a disposal team to get rid of everything in the kitchen. And whatever stash he’s hidden in this flat. I hope you understand.”

The man raises an eyebrow at her, his face still amused. “You think that’s going to stop him?” He jerks a thumb towards the equipment on the counter. “None of that is mine. I just controlled the dosages, kept him from killing himself.”

Molly raises a hand to her forehead. She feels the headache coming, raging and fierce.

“Dr. Hooper, he needs more than just some spooks.” Wiggins’ voice has grown soft. There’s a flicker in his dead eyes. “I can’t do anything for him. He won’t listen.”

Molly just looks at him, her face pale. The shadows under her eyes are dark, as if someone’s smudged charcoal on her skin. Her mouth feels heavy. She thinks again about leaving. Guam, somewhere warm.

“Alright,” she says. “Alright.”


	3. boundaries

Sherlock wakes in a hospital bed. Not unfamiliar, he thinks. Not at all.

He checks for a moment, to make sure that he’s not at Culverton Smith’s hospital, that the past few months have not been a drug-induced hallucination and that he’s not actually about to be killed, right now, by an insane billionaire.

No. It’s just a normal hospital.

“Good morning,” says Anthea, typing on her phone next to him.

He grimaces. She pats the piece of paper next to her, a few jagged lines of writing haphazardly scrawled along the wrinkled surface. 

“Thank you for this. It was very helpful.”

Sherlock closes his eyes, resting his head back on his pillow. “Where’s Mycroft?”

Anthea smiles. “Is this the brotherly affection we’ve been missing from you for so long?”

“Don’t be stupid,” he snaps. “He doesn’t usually talk to me through you.”

Anthea types something else into her phone. “He’s indisposed. He also mentioned that you probably don’t want to see him, and something about wanting to avoid strangulation.”

Sherlock snorts. “He’s always had an inordinate sense of self-preservation, much to the expense of everyone in his vicinity."

Anthea looks up once, her face bemused but her gaze sharp. He can imagine the message she's tapping into her phone. _Sherlock is still angry. Sherlock is still throwing a tantrum. Sherlock is not going to forgive you, not this time._

Sherlock fiddles with the IV tube sticking into the back of his hand. Third time, he muses. Third time in hospital, in less than a year. He’ll set a new record at this rate. 

“You won’t be going back to Baker Street,” Anthea announces, finally putting away her phone. Sherlock stares at her. 

“What do you mean?”

Anthea cocks her head, blinking innocently at him. “Molly Hooper has offered for you to stay at her flat for the time being. All things considered — _your meth lab_ considered — your brother thinks it’s a good idea.” 

Sherlock has gone pale with rage. “Mycroft is the last person who should be giving me _permission_ —”

“Dr. Hooper is asking,” Anthea says calmly. “She said she needs your help.”

The detective settles for a moment, remembering the dark marks under Molly’s eyes. The new lines around her mouth, as if her jaw is always being set and locked. Everything else that told him she isn’t sleeping, isn’t eating properly. 

“She doesn’t want me,” he says finally. “She made that very clear.”

Anthea looks at him, her eyes glittering. “Well, she’s asked for you. Whether it’s for you as Sherlock Holmes or you as the baby’s godfather, that’s something you can find out. But I recommend you listen to her request. For both your sakes.”

She rises with her phone already in her palm, heading towards the door. “We’ll send your things to her flat.” 

At the doorway, she pauses, a curtain of hair covering her face, before she turns to look at him. Anthea has always had the singular ability to match his constant discerning stares; it's what made Mycroft pick her from a handful of candidates for his assistant and eventual replacement. “Molly Hooper has come to your aid every time she’s been asked. Even when she didn’t want to. I think it’d be good if you remembered that.”

Sherlock swallows. He hesitates for a moment, before he says, “Thank you.”

Anthea’s eyebrows seem to disappear into her hair. “What did you say?”

He coughs and rolls his eyes. “I said, thank you. You told her about me, about Rosie. When John left. That’s why she came.”

Anthea stares. “No, I didn’t.” 

Sherlock stares back. He doesn’t think he heard her properly. “No, you did. Molly said you came to her flat.”

Anthea shakes her head slowly, her face growing concerned. “No, I’m fairly certain I didn’t. I’ve never talked to Dr. Hooper in person.”

She sees Sherlock register this information, his face growing white. He swallows once and nods. “I see.”

Anthea almost says something else, but she thinks again. She gives Sherlock a long, hard look. “Be careful,” she says, and then she’s gone. 

\--

He arrives in the morning, just after breakfast.

Liz is sitting with Rosie as Molly gets ready for work. Having a baby means she can’t do the same tornado of a routine that she used to, when she would shower and dress and shove a piece of toast in her mouth within fifteen minutes. Nowadays, she’s up before the sun, and she sits and feeds Rosie and watches as the sunlight creates new shadows on her carpet.

“Mols?” Liz’s voice is hesitant through the bathroom door. “Someone’s here to see you.”

Molly turns off the knob. Her hair drips onto the wet tiles and she shivers, wrapping a towel around herself. “Tell him I’ll be right there,” she calls back. 

He’s early. 

She’d been standing in the shower, feeling the water beat the back of her head, thinking of nothing. It’s been perhaps the single most restful moment of her day, standing and not thinking with warm water drowning out the noise in her head. Trust Sherlock to ruin it. 

Without thinking, she opens the door.

She sees Sherlock see her, naked except for the towel. Her hair is dripping down her back, her face flushed from the steam. He’s standing in the middle of the corridor, hanging up his coat, and he freezes like he’s been caught stealing from the pantry.

With no other option, Molly sweeps past him and escapes into her bedroom.

_Holy Jesus, Mary, and Joseph._

Sherlock’s low voice rumbles in from the kitchen, followed by Liz’s higher tones. Someone laughs, and Molly wants to die and sink into a swamp, her body never to be found. 

She’s seen Sherlock in various states of undress numerous times, but this — the other way around — this is a first. 

When Sherlock used her flat as a bolt hole during his two years in purgatory, she’d been so careful. He had hardly cared then; he was usually injured or sleeping or pacing up and down her living room, aching for a hit. If she’d done a strip show in front of him, she doesn’t think he would have noticed. Still, she’d been careful. She locked all her doors and averted her gaze when he stripped down to show her the latest wound that needed stitching. 

It was all a bit counter intuitive. She should have wanted him to see then, more than anything else. But she thinks that maybe she’d already been aware, already on the defensive. She doesn’t think she could have borne the indifference. 

She reemerges in a thick jumper, determined to cover as much of herself as possible. Her hair, still slick, hangs off her shoulders. She enters the kitchen and pours herself a coffee, trying to avoid eye contact.

“Mols! You didn’t tell me Mr. Holmes was coming by,” Liz says. Her voice is bright and cheery, which means she’s worried and trying not to show it. Molly still hasn’t told her everything, but she knows enough to be worried.

“Oh, yeah. Sorry, I forgot to mention it.” Molly takes a sip of her coffee. Sherlock is looming over Rosie’s high chair, a spoon in his hand. She’s already splattered some pea on the lapel of his coat. 

“He’ll be helping out now, so you don’t need to come by as often anymore. He’ll take care of Rosie while I’m at work.”

Liz’s smile remains frozen on her face. “I see.”

Molly drains the rest of her coffee, making a face at the sour aftertaste. She sneaks a look back at Sherlock, who looks very determined to make Rosie finish the entire bowl of mashed peas. His goddaughter no longer looks happy to see him. 

“Uh, Sherlock.” 

He jerked his head towards her. His eyes are bright, and she tries not to wince at the thought of him looking at her. “Your things are in the spare bedroom. There’s a mattress in there now, so you can have a proper bed this time.”

The words leave her mouth before she’s realized. Liz’s eyes widen, darting from the detective to her sister, but she says nothing. Sherlock’s face doesn’t change. He just nods, and resumes feeding his goddaughter. 

Molly watches for a moment. “You know, you can take off your coat.”

Sherlock freezes. He glances down at himself, and then he wordlessly heads back into the corridor to hang his coat again. Liz watches him go with narrowed eyes. “He’s been here before, has he?”

Molly drops her mug in the sink and runs the water. “He needed a place to stay a few times. That’s all.” 

Liz purses her lips but says nothing else as Sherlock comes back, his shirt sleeves rolled past the forearms. He picks up the spoon and resumes his attack on Rosie, until the baby shrieks and splatters pea all over the floor. After that, there’s no more time for conversation, and Molly quietly packs up her bag and leaves for the lab without saying goodbye.

\--

_takeaway ok? - molly_

_Chinese please. - SH_

_i already got italian. i'll be home at 7. - molly_

_Fine. - SH_

\--

It feels so bizarrely normal that Molly wants to throw up.

She brings bags of takeaway for dinner. The telly is usually on, blaring some talk show or a news report. Rosie doesn’t seem to mind the extra noise; Sherlock seems to strive on inane content. The more pointless the program, the more delighted he is. 

They eat dinner and watch telly and go to bed. Molly and Sherlock take turns getting up at night to look after Rosie. Molly still doesn’t sleep.

One night, she walks out to find Sherlock sitting on the sofa, holding a sleeping Rosie. 

“Hi,” she says, because she doesn’t know what else to say. 

He nods back, careful not to disturb the baby. He watches as she opens the medicine cabinet in her kitchen and takes her prescription. 

“How long have you not been sleeping?”

Molly swigs her water and turns to him. “Uh, about a year, I suppose. Since Mary died.” She winces a little. “But, you know, I’ve had sleeping problems since I was a kid. Lifelong insomniac, I suppose.”

Sherlock watches her wash the glass, put it in the drying rack. “I didn’t notice, last time I was here.”

Molly smiles a little. “Well, I don’t think you were always conscious when you were here. You wouldn’t have noticed.” She pauses. “And I’m good at hiding it.”

He draws his head back at that, his eyes still fixed on her. The ridiculousness of her statement hangs in the air — what could she possibly be good at hiding from Sherlock Holmes? But he doesn't challenge it; he says nothing. She waits for a moment before turning and starting back for her bedroom.

“Me too,” he says to her back. She looks back.

“What?”

He glances down at Rosie, who’s breathing softly in and out, dreaming. He strokes a thumb across her brow. 

“I haven’t slept since Mary died. Not properly.”

Molly looks at him, really looks at him. Pale, thin, unwell, sitting on her sofa with a baby in his arms. Her heart, the treacherous organ, wrenches a little. 

She swallows. “I suppose that makes all of us.” _You, me, Rosie. John. The ghosts in the room._

Sherlock’s eyes glitter in the darkness. He breathes out once. “Yes. Yes, I suppose.”

In the privacy of her bedroom, at the lab, on the commute home, Molly had wondered if she was being overly cruel. It was within her rights to draw the line, to make a boundary that Sherlock could not cross. For once in his life, Sherlock Holmes had to know that there were consequences. 

She just hadn’t expected him to look so lonely.

“Go to bed soon,” she says simply. “I’ll watch Rosie in the morning.” She turns away again, steps into the corridor.

“Molly.” 

His voice is so soft she almost doesn’t hear it. 

“Yeah?”

He’s looking away, the soft light from her bedroom creating strange shadows on his face. She remembers a painting she saw, one forgotten afternoon at the British Museum. Caravaggio’s painting of Peter being crucified upside down. Peter, paying penance.

“The consequence wasn’t just on you.”

She furrows her brow. What is he talking —

“On the island.” His face is still turned away. “It wasn’t just you.”

_I love you._

She hears it like a whisper in her ear, the breath brushing the nape of her neck. She doesn’t know how to reply. 

Her heart, the treacherous organ.

“Go to bed,” she says again. She turns away and leaves him on the sofa, shadows dancing through the window.

\--

Sherlock begins to leave during the night. 

He stands in her doorway, backlit by the dull glow of the hallway light. She strains her eyes to see the outline of his coat, a little too big for him now, and the sharp edge of his nose. 

“Rosie’s in her crib. I’ll be back in the morning.”

He waits for a moment, but she doesn’t ask questions; she doesn’t rise from her bed to check that he’s dressed warmly, to protest, to tell him to go back to bed. She looks at him and nods, and he sweeps out without another word.

As promised, he’s back by dawn. She’ll walk into the kitchen to see him sitting with his hands steepled at his mouth, still dressed in his day clothes. Sometimes, he’s holding Rosie, who’s teething and being miserable about it. Other times, he’s lying down with a nicotine patch on his forehead. 

She wonders if it’s a case, but she doesn’t ask. She doesn't want to know; she doesn't want to _care._

He’s late one morning. Molly sits feeling frantic as she watches the hours tick upwards. She needs to leave for work and Sherlock Holmes is nowhere to be seen.

She’s in the middle of a call to her shift supervisor, apologizing and asking for a replacement, when Sherlock stumbles in, smelling like pond water and dripping all over her carpet. 

She half-rises from the table, the phone still on her ear. “What in the world —”

He’s shivering as he shrugs out of his coat, leaving it a damp mess on the floor. His clothes are soaked through and the water dripping from his hair makes the ends of his curls sparkle in the sunlight. 

“Sherlock, I — hello? Yes, Steve. I’m so sorry. I, uh, something’s come up. Yes. Yes, please. I’m so sorry again. Thank you so much. Sherlock, _what are you doing_?”

He gestures to the buttons on his shirt. “Could you —” He shrugs helplessly. “They’re a bit stiff.”

Molly stands, open-mouthed. “Are you seriously trying to get pneumonia, again?”

He scowls. “I will if you don’t help me get out of these clothes, Molly.”

It’s like some twisted dream — Sherlock Holmes, asking her to undress him. 

She ignores her pounding head and walks into the other room. She grabs a towel from the linen closet and retrieves a dressing gown and dry clothes from the pile in his bedroom. 

He’s still struggling with the shirt when she comes back. 

“Here,” she sighs, dropping the load next to him. He takes the towel gratefully, running it through his hair, as she reaches for the buttons. Her fingers — _nimble fingers, a doctor’s fingers, years spent dissecting cadavers_ — make quick work of them, and Sherlock stands half-naked in her sitting room.

He shivers slightly as her hand brushes across his stomach, opening the last of the buttons. His torso is cold to the touch, and there’s a spectacular bruise blooming across the left side of his rib-cage. 

“Sherlock, what happened?”

He grabs her hand before she can touch it. “Don’t,” he says. “Still a bit painful.” 

She thinks two bruised ribs, maybe more. Maybe a fracture.

He takes off his belt with shaking hands and his trousers fall to the floor with a wet thud. He hisses as he bends over to pick up a shirt. 

Molly picks up the rest of his clothes and hands them to him, one by one. “Are you going to tell me anything?”

Sherlock looks up at her, his hands tying the dress robe tightly around his waist. “I thought you didn’t want to know. Wasn’t that the deal?”

He heads back into the kitchen and turns the kettle on. “Tea?” he asks casually. 

Molly grabs his arm, turning him against the counter. He groans in protest.

“Ow — Molly, that _hurts_ —”

She opens his dress robe and lifts up his shirt, examining the bruise. She presses lightly against it and he hisses. “ _Molly_.”

She flips the shirt back in place and glares back at him. “What deal?” she snaps.

The kettle whistles. Sherlock glances at it but doesn’t move. He stares at Molly instead, his face expressionless.

“You took me in. I assumed there were conditions.”

“Did you think showing up dripping wet with three bruised ribs was part of those conditions?” She pushes away from him, turning her back.

“I thought not knowing was what you wanted,” he says quietly. 

“That _is_ what I want! But you are making it so hard, so bloody difficult — ” She’s not yelling, not quite, but her voice is loud enough for Sherlock to flinch. 

He rubs a tired hand across his face. “Molly, I am trying. Can’t you see?” 

She looks at him, wide-eyed with anger. She's shaking a little with it, with anger and the hot shame of knowing that it's misdirected, that it's nothing Sherlock's _done_ as much as caused within herself. “You’re trying? You made me miss my shift this morning. You walk in here, freezing and injured, and you’re trying?”

“ _Then what do you want from me?_ ” He’s also not yelling, but Molly takes a step back. Sherlock waves a hand around, and she spots the slightest tremor running through it. “Molly, I didn’t ask you to come back. I didn’t ask you to take Rosie, and I especially did not ask you to bring me here. I’ve never asked anyone to _care_.”

They’re facing each other, both angry and breathing deeply, the sound of their not-yells ringing between them. Sherlock’s hand is shaking. Molly can see it and — _god fucking damn it all to hell_ — she cares. She cares. 

“Make up your mind,” he says finally, quiet again. “You can care or you can not, but don’t — don’t make me hope.” 

He brushes past her, leaving her alone and cold in the silent kitchen.


	4. caring

She returns to work for a midnight shift, only to find Mycroft Holmes sitting in her laboratory, sipping coffee from one of the old tin mugs in the canteen. He smiles when she enters. 

“Dr. Hooper, what a pleasure.”

She freezes, looking from the entrance to the table where Mycroft is sitting. “You can’t get in here without a pass,” she says dully. 

Mycroft’s expression doesn’t waver, but she knows Sherlock well enough to know the thoughts running through his brother’s head. _Stupid, stupid, stupid. Of course he can get in without a pass._

He gestures to the chair in front of him, as gracious as any host. “Please, sit down.”

Molly swallows the insult of being told to sit in her own lab and moves towards the table instead, snapping on her gloves. “It’s almost 1 in the morning.”

“So I’ve observed,” he replies.

Molly leans against the counter, trying to steady herself against the headache. It’s only been growing more painful these days, ever since the row in the kitchen. Mycroft’s presence is making it infinitely worse. 

“We haven’t really spoken before, have we, Dr. Hooper?” Mycroft muses. He’s examining the coffee with some distaste, but he drains the rest of it anyways. “Not since Sherlock came back.”

“No, I suppose we haven’t.” She finally turns and takes the seat across from him. “Is there something I can help you with?”

Mycroft’s mask slips. He looks down at the table, at his umbrella. “You’ve already done quite enough.”

She blinks. Mycroft shifts slightly in his chair, readjusting the umbrella in his lap. “I came to say thank you. I know it cannot have been easy.”

He gives her a sad look. Molly stares back and remembers when she first met him — in the same building, on Christmas Day, all those years ago. There was a dead woman lying on a slab between them, and Sherlock had looked at her with the saddest face she had ever seen. 

She still remembers Mycroft’s words. _Caring is not an advantage._

“I haven’t cared, if that’s what you mean,” she says. The words feel sharp in her mouth. “I’ve tried really, really hard not to care. And Sherlock knows it.”

The guilt is bitter. Cyanide, almonds that have gone rancid. 

“You have invited my brother into your home and you have let him see his goddaughter. You have kept him clean and _safe_ ,” Mycroft says. “Considering the circumstances, you have given us a great kindness. Lord knows we don’t deserve it.”

She doesn’t know what to say to that, so she stays silent. The only noise is the ticking clock that hangs on the opposite wall and the steady hum of the lights. Finally, Mycroft sighs. “Dr. Hooper, my brother is not like me. He forms strong attachments. He learned early in his life what those attachments might do to him if broken. It has made him who he is today.” 

He looks at her and smiles, bitter and guilty and sad. “My fault, I’m afraid.”

Molly thinks about Eurus Holmes, the lost sister. The murderer, the true psychopath, the one whose mind shone so brightly that it invited in a black hole. A woman, barely two years older than herself, locked away on an island for almost her entire life. 

Sherlock hasn’t spoken about her once.

“Does he blame you?” Her voice is soft, almost gentle. 

Mycroft flinches. He doesn’t answer, not for some time. It doesn’t matter. It’s 1 in the morning and she has all the time in the world.

“Yes.” His voice is hoarse. “He blames me. He’s been angry for some time.”

“And you don’t know why,” she says. She sees it, as clearly as she sees the white-knuckled grip on his umbrella, the downturn of his mouth. “You think you were trying to protect him, and you think that’s enough.”

Mycroft’s eyes are a deeper blue than his brother’s. His gaze could hardly be called frigid, and yet here she is, feeling like the very air in the room is frosting over. 

“I will not apologize for keeping him safe. I have kept everyone safe.”

Molly shakes her head. “You two are typical. So typical. No one would ever think you weren't brothers." 

Mycroft just watches her and says nothing. Molly’s blood is humming. If she’s being honest, Mycroft terrifies her; he always had. But she still pushes herself forward in her chair, forcing herself to meet his gaze. 

“You apologize because there have been consequences, no matter the intent. If someone got hurt because of you, then someone got hurt. That is enough to be sorry.” 

Mycroft smiles, a shark in his face. “And what about you? Did Sherlock hurt you while trying to keep you safe? Is this why you have tried to refuse to care?”

Molly’s stomach clenches. She grits her teeth, pulls off her gloves. They’re ruined now, anyways. “That’s none of your business.” 

“He was devastated,” Mycroft says, his voice as clear as if he was speaking in her ear. “He only recovered because he needed to be a soldier. Soldiers make sacrifices.”

Molly looks back at him with her jaw wired tight. She can feel her entire body tensing, readying itself for an attack. “He was guilty about lying to me. Sherlock’s never been good with guilt.”

“No,” Mycroft corrects. His voice drawls, like a school teacher pointing out a student’s careless mistake. “He gave himself over to sentiment. He cared, which meant he lost.”

There’s a snake uncoiling in her stomach, full and thick in its horror. She wants to scream. “What are you saying?”

There’s something like pity in Mycroft’s face. “There was a coffin in the room. Not with your name on it, but Sherlock knew right away. He knew it would be for you.”

_It wasn’t just you. The consequence wasn’t just on you._

_I love you._

“Imagine for a moment, Dr. Hooper.” Mycroft continues, softly, slowly. “Imagine realizing how much you care for something, and then realizing in that same moment that you’ve destroyed it.” 

The mask slips completely. Mycroft is looking at her, his face absolutely, horribly sad. 

“Sherlock is more alone than he has ever been. It is a ruin of his own making.” 

She thinks about the tremor in his hand. His left hand, shaking. She remembers John Watson, and somewhere, her heart is breaking.

Mycroft stands, collecting his umbrella. He lingers for a moment, a dark figure in the corner of her vision. He places a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“We are not kind men, Dr. Hooper. We have not had the privilege. I will admit that I have never quite understood the sentiment that my brother places toward the people around him. But I know my brother. He is better than me in the ways that matter.” 

He gives her shoulder a small squeeze, and then she hears the door click quietly shut behind him. 

\--

The flat is empty when she comes home. The air is still and for a moment, she remembers when things were normal, when she was alone and she did not live with a baby and Sherlock Holmes. 

There’s a note on the table.

_On a case. Left Rosie with your sister. - SH_

Molly reads the note twice and then folds it neatly and places it in a drawer. She sits at the table and lays her forehead in the palm of her hands, her eyes closing, breathing in her exhaustion. Formaldehyde and disinfectant, cold and clinical. 

She remembers the moments after the phone call. The abrupt disconnect, the empty sound of the dial tone as she stuttered to no one, “Hello? H-hello? Sherlock?” How she sat and saw nothing for hours afterwards, even when Lestrade eventually arrived with a bomb squad and discovered the cameras that had recorded everything. 

She had realized then, how dangerous it was for her to love a man like Sherlock Holmes. Like putting her hand between the jaws of a wolf and believing that it wouldn't clamp them shut around her appendages, that it wouldn't lunge for her throat. 

_The treatment plan,_ she thinks, somewhat absent-mindedly. _Remember the treatment plan._

A treatment plan, to stop caring, to stop loving Sherlock, to stop getting hurt. 

Look how well _that_ turned out.

Rising, she rubs a hand over her eyes as she phones her sister. Liz picks up after two rings.

“Hi, Liz. Yeah, so sorry. Um, Sherlock had a last minute thing, apparently. Do you mind if I actually leave Rosie with you for a few more hours? I’m a little bogged down.”

Her sister’s sigh crackles over the line. “Of course. Don’t worry about that. Just..Molly? Are you doing okay?”

The worry is palpable. Molly thinks of Mycroft, the same look on his face when he thinks no one’s looking. What a burden elder siblings have to carry. 

“I’m fine. Please don’t worry.” She doesn’t bother trying for levity. Liz will worry even more if she can hear Molly faking it. 

Liz is quiet for a moment; all Molly hears is the telly in the background. Then she sighs again. “Look, Mols. I’m not sure if this Sherlock is good for you. He seems really clever, but I see the way you look at him and...he seems like a lot.”

“Oh. Well, I know he can be rude, but if you get to know him —”

“No, it’s not that.” Liz hesitates. “He seems sad. And I know you, around sad people. You give too much. It gets hard on you.” She pauses again, waiting. “Molly, you just have to...find a balance, you know? Care about yourself too. Just a little.”

A squeal comes from the background, followed by a lot of clanking. Liz curses. “Crap, I gotta go. Rosie’s spilled something. Anyways, I can come drop her off if you’re busy. Love you, Mols.”

The line clicks. Molly stares at the phone, and then she lays her head down on the table and cries until it feels like something is empty and she can breathe, just a little.

\--

In her dream, Sherlock sits in the dark of the lab, his eyes hungry and filled with something like wanting as he stares into a microscope. When he registers her presence, the gaze turns to cold indifference. 

“Stupid girl,” he says. “Blinded by sentiment. Is that really the best you can do?”

He walks from the lab to the edge of a rooftop, and Molly watches as Moriarty emerges behind him, raising a gun. She tries to scream, but Sherlock looks past him and looks at her. He’s pale as death. 

“Stupid girl,” he says again. “What could you possibly do to help?”

He lifts his arms and falls. She watches as his head smashes into the concrete, his brain spilling into the cracks. John Watson waits, burying his hands in Sherlock’s blood, his heart. He looks up.

“You were supposed to care,” he hisses at her. “It was your job.”

She tries to shout back but her voice won’t come out. _But it was your job to stay. How could you have left everything behind,_ she says soundlessly into the air. _How did you manage to do it?_

John Watson doesn’t reply. He kneels next to Sherlock, whose eyes are empty and staring back at her. _Stupid girl_ , says the corpse.

She wakes in the dark, shuddering into her mattress.

“Bad dream?”

The voice comes from beside her. Sherlock is sitting on top of her bedspread, his back resting against the headboard, his legs stretched out next to her. 

She turns, her body heavy. “What time is it?” she mumbles. Her mouth feels like cotton. 

“Past five. You’ve been asleep for a long time.”

She shivers again, her nose numb against the cold in the flat. “It’s freezing.” She draws the blanket closer to her, pulling tight from under Sherlock. He moves slightly, to give it more leeway. 

She looks up at him, her heart beating. “Aren’t you cold?” 

He gives a single nod, looking down at her. “Are you still cold?”

She nods back. 

He lifts the bedspread and crawls in next to her, his head hitting the pillow. He turns towards her, and they lie face to face, staring. Molly can feel the warmth rising from his body, and she holds a hand up to his chest as if she can feel it radiating from him. 

“Better?” he asks, looking down at her hand. 

She swallows and nods again. He lets out a breath and closes his eyes. Without opening them, he asks, “What was in your dream?”

Her hand falls and rests against him. “You. You, Jim, John.”

He opens his eyes. He watches her trace a finger on his sternum, down towards his rib cage. “How is the bruising?” she asks. A question for a question. 

His voice is low. “Better,” he says. “Where was John?”

Molly’s eyes are sad. They were sad when she had them closed, asleep on the kitchen table, and they’re sad now that they’re open. He doesn’t remember when they weren’t quite so sad. 

“He was next to you,” she whispers. “He told me I was supposed to care.” She watches his throat move as he swallows, and she moves her hand away. “What’s your case?” 

He looks at her then, blue eyes meeting brown ones. His eyes are lit with a familiar intensity. “The woman who came to your flat, a few weeks ago. The one who told you to come see me with Rosie. She wasn’t from Mycroft.”

Molly’s eyes widen. “Then who was she?” 

“I have my theories. Or, really, just the one. It’s what I’ve been checking.” 

“What’s your theory?”

Sherlock’s lips thin. It could almost be a smile. “You’ve already asked two questions. It’s my turn.”

Molly scowls. “Fine.”

“Have you made up your mind?” He waits. The silence stretches, long and shaking between them. 

Her heart beats. “Yes,” she finally says. 

Sherlock reaches for her face, lifts away a strand of hair on her forehead.

“Do you care?” he asks. His thumb rests on her cheekbone. 

“Yes,” she breathes. Her heart beats. “Yes, I do.”


	5. whiskey

_Let’s have dinner._

_Where?_

_You know where to find me._

\--

She finds him, of all places, at St. Bart’s. 

It’s his turn to watch Rosie, who’s babbling near his ear and dripping a steady stream of saliva on his shoulder. She squirms in protest when Sherlock suddenly stops dead in his tracks, a hand resting protectively across her back.

Irene smiles at him, her lips red. 

“Good evening.”

She looks thinner than when he last saw her, the angled cut of her newly bobbed hair accentuating the sharpness of her face. Underneath her foundation — a shade too pale for her, she got tanner abroad — there are traces of dark circles rimming her eyes. 

Despite her smile, she looks afraid.

He gingerly takes the seat in front of her, balancing Rosie against him. It feels comfortable now, even natural. As if there has always been a baby, and he has always been its caretaker. 

“You look good with a baby. A domestic dream.”

Sherlock doesn’t deign to reply. He raises his eyebrows at her. “I didn’t mean for you to find me here. The food is terrible.”

Her smile grows a tinge more genuine. “I’m not a high maintenance girl.”

He can’t help it; a corner of his mouth twitches. He hadn’t expected to see her again, let alone in London with Rosie on his chest and the smell of St. Bart’s canteen clogging his nostrils. But here they are. 

“What do you want?”

Irene raises her cup of steaming coffee, takes a sip, before fixing her eyes on him. “You’re the one who wanted to have dinner,” she points out.

“You know what I mean. Why risk coming back?”

“On the contrary,” she says. “There wasn’t that much risk. I’m supposed to be dead, remember? There’s no one looking for a dead woman.”

“Yet you’re still here.” Sherlock looks at her with pale eyes, filled with as much wariness as interest. “What do you want?”

She doesn’t blame him for being cautious. It’s what happens when men begin to build lives for themselves, when they have something to lose. Jim would weep, she thinks. 

“I was curious.” 

She looks at Rosie, her sweet round head cradled against Sherlock’s chest. The baby looks back at her, its eyes a deeper blue, wide and unblinking. Something in her recoils. 

“And I thought I should rescue you.” She sets her coffee down on the table, metal hitting metal with a harsh clang. It rings through the empty canteen, and Rosie begins to cry.

Sherlock spends a good minute lifting Rosie up to his shoulder, shushing her with soothing sounds from his throat. Irene looks at the base of his neck, remembering a night when she had traced a finger in its hollow. A wind, blowing through linen curtains in a nameless room in Karachi. 

“From what?”

She wonders, for a moment, if he’s playing dumb. He normally hates asking questions; she’s used to listening to a stream of impossible observations drawn out of him like a fishing line. But the way he’s looking at her, blankly and with most of his attention drawn towards Rosie — he’s not playing at anything. He’s not trying to impress her. 

“Do you think John is coming back?” She sips the coffee. It tastes like battery acid, burning her as it slides down her throat. 

Sherlock’s expression remains impassive, cold and unmoved at the mention of his best friend. She cocks her head and watches him, waiting for a flicker. It doesn’t come. 

“It must have been hard, without John.”

He stares at her, his mouth a sharp line slashed across his pale face. His eyes are burning her. 

“Is this why you’re here?” he asks.

Her stomach twists and she leans forward. She wonders if he can smell the desperation. Like recognizes like. He, of all people, would recognize it. 

“Come with me.” Her voice is low, almost rough. Desperation is ugly on other people; it's probably ugly on her. She's seen it enough times when someone realizes that she's been keeping track of what they like, what they're too scared to admit to liking. She'd always wondered how they could stand it, that kind of ugliness. She realizes now that when someone is desperate, it becomes very difficult to care about anything else.

Something moves in Sherlock’s face, and he leans back, lifting Rosie in front of him. Her head rests on his shoulder. 

“John Watson is gone. There’s nothing keeping you here. Come with me." she says again. "There are other people who can take care of his child. You don’t have to be responsible.”

“What is it you think I need to be rescued from?” he asks, his voice soft. 

She reaches a hand out, toward his arm resting on the table. She wants to feel his skin, trace the calluses across his palm, the reassuring evidence of his flesh, the blood running through him. She tries to laugh, the stretch of her lips feeling unnatural on her face. 

“Isn’t it all so boring?” She gestures around the canteen and looks pointedly at the child on his chest. “You must be bored out of your mind.”

Sherlock just stares at her, waiting. Something in her chest gives in, and Irene looks away. 

“Look at everyone who’s left you,” she whispers. “Don’t you think you should leave too?”

She wonders if he sees the faces, a roster of the dead and the missing running through him like thread through a needle. She wonders, because like recognizes like and she sees her own dead every night. She wants to tell him that she desperately wishes to avoid seeing him too. 

“You sent Molly Hooper,” he says quietly. “You want to rescue me from her as well?”

Irene blinks and sees a pale woman with brown hair and plain eyes, something strained and worn at the corner of her lips, a terrible sweater and the stench of formaldehyde embalming her. Molly Hooper was her definition of a last resort.

“You were dying,” she says. “I had to do something.”

He looks at her, his face drawn into something like pity and incredulity. “I wasn’t dying,” he says calmly. “You were lonely, and you needed an excuse.”

Irene Adler, former dominatrix, feels a rush of something at the back of her throat. If she didn’t know better, she would think they were tears. She looks at his left hand, holding onto Rosie, and the tremor running through it. She knows he’s right, but she’s right as well.

“You were dying,” she corrects him. “You were dying and I am lonely, and I want you to come with me. It’s my turn.”

In Karachi, the wind smelled like stale sand baked under a desert sun. Even at nightfall, the heat never left the wind, and she remembers kneeling in the dirt with the smooth plastic of the phone in her hands and wishing for the cooler rain in London. She heard the blade swing and then an impossible moan, and then Sherlock Holmes told her to run. 

She remembers, and she sees, for a moment, a future where Sherlock comes with her. It’s a glittering haze of hope, fueled by a desert wind and the potential of the glint in his eyes. She wonders if she had asked then, the night in Karachi, if he would have said yes. 

“I’m not dying anymore,” he tells her. His face looks harsh under the fluorescent lights, but his eyes are gentle. They look at her and her heart falls to her stomach, because she knows his answer. She’s known for some time, but here it is, all the same. 

He looks from her to Rosie, and then back to her. “You were never in my debt. You know that.”

His words hang in the silence of the canteen, floating on the surface tension of the air. Irene stares at Rosie, at the yawning expanse of her tiny skull. She wonders if she’ll ever see her father again. In her heart, in the deepest part of herself, she hopes she does. She prays that she will. 

Sherlock watches as the woman slides her phone across to him, an outdated Blackberry gleaming against the metallic sheen of the table. The keys are worn smooth from use, but he can tell from the veneer of dust in the edges that it’s been stored away somewhere for quite some time. He looks at it for a moment, before reproducing a copy of the same phone from his pocket. He’s been carrying it with him, all this time. 

“I should have known,” he says, his voice tinged with surprise and sadness, all at once. “But you’ve always been good at what you do.”

He puts the phone in the middle of the table and takes the one she slid to him. He holds it in his hands, his face lit by the screen. 

“Is the passcode still the same?”

She smiles, a proper smile. It makes her look decades younger, almost girlish. He saw that expression only once, in Karachi, when she looked up and saw his eyes and heard his voice, and that smile bloomed across her face like a desert flower. 

“Yes,” she says. “Take it. I don’t need it anymore.” 

\--

“Dr. Hooper?” 

Molly doesn’t look up from her piping. “What is it,” she murmurs, half-aware of her intern hanging nervously next to her. 

“Um, Mr. Holmes is here. He asked to see you.”

Molly looks up at that, the final drop from her pipette splashing down on the petri dish and rendering the entire procedure completely useless. She curses, loudly, her annoyance bleeding towards the nervous presence on her left. 

“Oh, _fucking Christ_ — sorry, Garrett. I, uh, I’ll go see Mr. Holmes. Could you wrap up here?” 

Snapping off her gloves, Molly isn’t sure her annoyance is at the ruined experiment as much as it is toward herself, a consummate professional, screwing up at the mention of Sherlock. _Honestly,_ she thinks. _Pull yourself together._

He’s sitting next to her locker, pushing Rosie back and forth in her pram, and staring at the wall, his face frozen in the same expression that he gets when he’s stuck on a case. She approaches cautiously, waving a hand.

“Sherlock?”

One second, two, and then his eyes snap towards her. He looks wretched, almost grieving. 

She doesn’t ask. It’s part of the deal, whatever it is that is now unspoken between them. She doesn’t ask, she just steps forward and wraps her arms around him, holding his head of curls against her chest. He lets her do it, falling heavy against her. 

They stay like that for the space of a second, his head warm against her sternum, her fingers laced through his hair. His arms come around her, pulling her closer, and she folds into him until it feels like they occupy the same breath. 

She feels his shoulders shake once, twice, and she reaches down to feel the tremor down his left arm. He doesn’t notice. 

_Psychosomatic_ , she thinks. _But we already knew that._

Molly Hooper wonders if he’ll explain, one day. She wonders if she wants him to explain, if she even wants to know. Perhaps it’s better this way. Not knowing makes things a little easier, sometimes. 

\--

By early spring, Sherlock moves back to Baker Street, along with Mrs. Hudson, and something like order is restored to the universe. 

Mrs. Hudson fusses, mostly over Rosie, but she spares a spot of tea and some sandwiches up to 221B when she remembers. Sherlock meets Lestrade again, and Wigs is nowhere to be seen.

It should be better. The boulder sitting on Molly’s chest should be gone now, but it sits more heavily than it ever has before. She spends her nights curled up in bed, alternating between wet sobs and dry-eyed staring, and the headache drums even faster in her temples. 

Still. She goes to work, she sees Rosie, she takes her home when it’s her turn to do baby-sitting. She helps Mrs. Hudson keep Sherlock’s fridge stocked and limit biohazards as much as possible, and she occasionally breaks into the flat to do a cursory check for — something. 

For what? Mrs. Hudson asks, playing dumb. Anything, Molly shrugs, smiling sweetly. 

Sherlock tolerates it all, which is almost heroic, coming from him. She sees the clench in his jaw when he sees her, as if the stain of infiltrating his living space is still on her fingers. As if he hasn’t done the same, maybe more, trespassing into her apartment until all she can see is him, on the sofa, in the kitchen, in the spare bedroom, on her bed. 

She gives him a small smile and goes back to work, making sure her pipette isn’t shaking, until he files a request for a spleen, an engorged stomach, an inflamed liver. 

“Have you done the paperwork?” she asks pointedly, and he smiles at her. No, of course not.

Lestrade gives a half-hearted, apologetic gesture behind him and Molly smiles at him. Sherlock raises an eyebrow at the exchange but says nothing, and she wordlessly gives him the pass to the autopsy ward while gesturing at the intern to print the required forms. 

It’s normal. Things are back to normal. This was what she wanted, she tells herself sternly. This is what he needed, so this is what she wanted, because this is what caring is. 

She hears a ringing in response. _Remember your treatment plan. You made it for a reason._

She ignores it.

\--

They stand around the fourth dead body of the month, in a long string of murders that have steadily increased with the encroaching summer, and Lestrade can taste the decomposition in the back of his throat. 

Sherlock doesn’t wear a mask. He makes no sign that he can smell the putrefaction as he kneels next to the corpse with his magnifying glass, barking out observations that Lestrade obediently jots down on a notepad. 

Molly’s there, playing John. 

“Female, mid-to-late thirties, time of death is three days ago, maybe more. Cause of death, well…” Molly points to the gaping wound in the victim’s throat, a pen knife into the artery. Her voice is muffled by her mask, but Lestrade hears the pity. “It was probably quick.” 

It’s a hope as much as it is a diagnosis. Lestrade’s eyes automatically snap over to Sherlock who, just a year ago, would have sneered at a sentiment-driven prediction made without substantial evidence, but the man says nothing. He nods at Molly and thanks her quietly, and she shrugs and moves to the side to record more notes about the corpse. 

It feels different. Lestrade watches them, his old instincts humming. The two seem to be circling each other cautiously, reaching out with tendrils of nervous energy to see how the other is doing, feeling. It’s not unexpected from Molly but it’s almost frightening coming from Sherlock. 

Later, after they hand the scene over to forensics and Molly begs off to go back to her flat for some sleep, Lestrade spots Sherlock watching from the entrance of the building. He watches Molly hail a cab and leave with a quick wave, and he keeps staring after the car has turned the corner. 

When it becomes too much, Lestrade claps a hand on Sherlock’s shoulder. “Why don’t we get a drink, mate? It’s on me.”

He is fully expecting a rejection, for Sherlock to become impatient to return to the lab and test samples from the body and the crime scene, but the man turns and nods. Lestrade stares at him, his mind wiped blank for a second. “Oh. Okay, yeah. So, drinks. Where to?”

In the end, they enter a skivvy looking pub a couple streets down from the crime scene. Sherlock is, predictably, a whiskey man. 

“So,” Lestrade begins, with all the subtlety of a freight train. “What’s going on between you and Molly?”

Sherlock stares at him, his face twitching, before he swallows most of his whiskey and looks down at the table. He looks unsettled here, an animal in the wrong environment. 

“You don’t quite have your priorities in order,” he says finally. “That was the fourth body in a month and you want to waste time by talking about my personal life?"

Lestrade raises a defensive hand. “If you wanted to talk about the body, you would have gone to the lab.”

Sherlock sips his drink again. Lestrade spots his left hand shaking for a brief second, but he blinks and Sherlock sets the whiskey down and moves his hand beneath the table. Lestrade looks up and sees the man staring at him, and there’s enough warning in his eyes that he backs off the topic of his hand. 

Instead, he asks, "Are you replacing John? Is that what you're doing?"

Sherlock looks up at that, his eyes narrowing. " _Don't,_ " he says carefully, his anger skirting the surface of his voice. 

Lestrade shakes his head, draining the rest of his beer. "Don't what?" he pushes back. "You have her coming with you to crime scenes and taking notes and telling you pretty compliments, but she looks like she's down to her last wire. What are you doing?"

Sherlock's jaw is clenched tight against his skull, but Lestrade smells something familiar, copper in the air. Guilt is metallic. 

"She's not John," he says finally. "She didn't leave. I thought she would leave, but she didn't." His voice drops, something hollow in its base. "She's not a soldier. She's not John."

"No," Lestrade agrees. "She's not."

"She won't be safe. I can't keep her safe; I can't keep anyone safe." Sherlock's eyes are bright before he drops his head, staring down at the tremor in his left hand, the undeniable evidence of his heart pulsing, beating. "I'm not a good man, I know I'm not a good man, and she's the evidence. And I want, I want — I _want_ her to stay."

Lestrade breathes out a heavy sigh, running a tired hand over his chin. He needs a shave. He needs to sort out his priorities. Sherlock was right — there's a serial killer somewhere and he really doesn't want to discover another corpse rotting in a cellar during the height of a heat wave. _God_ , this is a terrible smelling pub.

“Speaking as a divorced man whose wife left him twice," he says wearily, "If you want someone to stay, you have to give them a reason. You can't guarantee her safety or her protection, but you can give her a reason. That's all she needs. The rest of it — the rest of it will figure itself out, in due time."

He raises a finger, signaling for another round, and clasps his other hand around Sherlock’s shoulder. “Now. We’re going to deal with this like proper men and get rip-roaring plastered.”

\--

At midnight, there’s a banging on her door. 

Her heart is in her mouth when she wakes, hammering so loudly that she’s sure that the person on the other side can hear it. She reaches for the can of mace in her purse, the tin cold in her hand. 

“Molly?"

Sherlock’s voice is not loud, but there’s something off about it. Molly abandons the can and unlocks the door, swinging it wide as she looks up and down the detective, trying to detect injuries or illness. “Sherlock, what’s wrong?”

The smell hits her first. Whiskey and stale beer, laid over a rich cologne that she’s never been able to name. Sherlock sways a little before leaning against the door frame, his eyes unfocused. 

“Molly,” he says again. “Hello.”

“Hello,” she whispers back. His eyes, staring at nothing, snap upwards and lock onto her own. 

A breath. Two breaths. Whiskey, she thinks. Definitely whiskey. Cheap brand, and even cheaper beer. A standard pub crawl mix. 

He steps closer. The alcohol has left a red flush on his neck, trailing down past the buttoned part of his shirt. She’s close enough to see the rise and fall of his chest, to feel the air from his breaths.

Another step, and the door creaks shut behind him. He feels warmer than usual, presumably from the alcohol, but perhaps also because she hasn’t been this close to him in a while. He makes no move to step away and she stares up, her breath hitching. He stares back. 

“A bit of liquid courage, then?” she whispers.

“I suppose so,” he replies. He reaches up, a hand caressing her face, a thumb on her cheekbone. He leans in, his lips hovering over hers like a question.

Ever so slightly, she nods. 

Whiskey, she thinks. Definitely whiskey. 


	6. return

John comes back on a sunlit afternoon. 

Molly’s in the flat, reviewing samples from the latest crime scene and baby-sitting Rosie at the same time. She’s made notes about the killer’s method of choice (stabbing with a pen knife, usually to the neck, a few times to the heart, and one time, quite sadistically, along the victim’s forearms), to see if there’s anything of note to send back to Scotland Yard, but it’s menial, mostly useless work. Whatever she has, it’ll be twenty steps too late for Sherlock. 

Rosie starts squealing, her screams throaty and raw, and Molly is too busy trying to shush her in her chair to notice John step quietly into 221B, a bag hitting the floor. 

“Hi, Molly.”

She spins around, a pen knife dancing in the edges of her vision. When she sees him, her heart drops. Somehow, this might be worse. 

“Oh my god, John.”

He’s noticeably thinner, his face older. His hair has gone slightly grey. He’s smiling, but it’s a brittle expression, like he’s waiting for something to go wrong.

Molly doesn’t wait. She has time to be angry, time to yell and throw his bag against him and demand answers — but John is her friend, he’s the father of her goddaughter. He disappeared for months because he couldn’t live his life anymore. And she knows, _she knows_ , he didn’t have to come back.

John recoils a little as she throws her arms around him, but he swallows his surprise and hugs her back. “Welcome back, John,” she says. “Welcome home.”

\--

It is, in some ways, disturbingly familiar.

John nurses his bloody nose next to the deli station, Sherlock coldly ordering two sandwiches and a carton of milk for Rosie. Molly is fluttering between nervous franticness and amusement, her eyes moving rapidly between the two men. Rosie squeals.

“At least I left a note. You didn’t think I was dead.”

“Shut up,” Sherlock snaps. “Eat,” he orders Molly, shoving half of a sandwich into his mouth. He chews robotically, refusing to make eye contact with his former flatmate.

John doesn’t protest his empty plate. He simply sits with his hands folded, waiting. Observing. 

“So...when did this become a thing?” he finally asks, waving a hand between them. Sherlock and Molly freeze, their mouths half full with sandwiches. Rosie lets out another squeal.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Molly says carefully around her sandwich, before swallowing. “Sherlock and I are friends, as we’ve always been.”

Sherlock glances at her, just once, but it’s enough for John to catch it and smile, sipping the coffee that Sherlock deigned to buy for him after much glaring from Molly. 

“Very domestic,” he says slowly. “Bit out of character, but if you’re happy.”

“You’re one to talk about out of character,” Sherlock snaps back. His normally pale face is flushed, his eyes glittering. He was angry before, but whatever bitterness he’s held back since he saw John again is out in full force in his voice, thick and suffocating. “You _left._ ”

John puts down the coffee, the smile sliding off his face. He looks desperately tired. “I needed...I had to get my head straight.”

He looks to Sherlock, whose face is stony and turned towards the table. “I still see her. I thought if I went away, it’d get better. But she’s here, every single day. I don’t want Rosie…” His voice thins out and he clears his throat, his mouth the same stubborn, soldier line. “I didn’t want Rosie to deal with a father like me. She deserves better.”

“Where did you go?” Sherlock’s voice is quiet. 

John blinks at him in surprise. “You didn’t know?”

Sherlock looks up at that, his eyes bright. “I didn’t think you wanted me to.” 

John nods, leaning back slightly and looking away at nothing. He raps his knuckles twice on the table, staring at the top of Rosie’s warm head. “Right, right.” He sighs, rubbing a hand over the jowls of his cheeks. “I went to America. Washington first, but that was a mistake. She didn’t come from there.” 

“She grew up in New York,” Sherlock replies. 

John nods. “I looked for her parents. I thought...they probably deserved to know that they had a granddaughter, at least. Mary talked about them sometimes. Not often, but enough. It took some time, but I found them in South Orange, somewhere in New Jersey. Retired, you know, after Mary disappeared.” He pauses. “Mary looks like her mother. Looked like her mother.”

Molly sees an older woman, golden hair tinged with grey, listening to this unknown man tell her about another Rosamund, a small bundle of a thing who is all that’s left of a Mary Watson. In a place called South Orange, in a small house on a boulevard lined with the sparse branches of red oak trees, John looks for his wife. She sees it, and she clenches Rosie tighter. 

It takes a moment, but his face crumbles the way John Watson’s face crumbles — like a rock resisting a tidal wave. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. 

He isn’t looking at Sherlock or Molly. Rosie stares back at her father, her eyes blue as anything, and Molly wonders if John can also see the small traces of Mary already present in her tiny face. 

There is always a ghost present in the corner of the eye. Sometimes it hovers barely out of sight, as if it is on the verge of vanishing into the air, its essence swallowed by the light of other things. On other days, it occupies the full scope of the iris, and it becomes hard to imagine that there is anything else on the face of the earth. On those days, life is lived haunted. 

The three of them sit together in the deli, seeing their dead occupy the gaps between the chairs, ordering a sandwich from the counter, arguing with the owner over missed change. Life is lived haunted, but Molly presses her hand into John’s palm, and Sherlock presses his hand on his best friend’s shoulder, and together, they wait for the ghosts to be appeased, for the sun to emerge from behind the curtain. 

\--

Life becomes unbearably quiet without Rosie. 

John hasn’t decided fully to be back; he came to get his daughter, to fly with her over the Atlantic to return to South Orange, to introduce her to grandparents once thought lost. Molly checks and double checks the baby bag, sneaks in a bit of colic medication, extra nappies, another pacifier (“ _Another_ one?” John asks in dismay, looking at the litter of colorful plastic and rubber in an obnoxiously yellow duckie bag. “She’ll have enough to give to her own grandkids at this rate.” “Shut up,” Sherlock advises from the corner armchair.), and about two dozen kisses before John waves at them from the taxi, Rosie tucked underneath his chin. 

Molly can’t help it; her lip trembles as she keeps waving at the car turning the corner. She only looks away when Sherlock slips his fingers between her own, his hand warm and dry. They stand like that, quiet, staring at an empty street. 

Summer bleeds into autumn with a gasp of relief, the rainy heat dissipating into a haze of crisp sunshine. After John leaves, Sherlock finds the pen knife killer (Vincent Spaulding, retired medical doctor targeting patients from his former practice under bouts of psychosis) and hurls himself into an entirely new case with almost no turn around. In the middle of her own work, Molly caves and hunts down a pair of lungs from a 45-year old heroin addict of Irish origin that has Sherlock grinning at her with a familiar manic glint and a kind of fondness that leaves her flushed when he whirls out of the lab. 

When the days grow colder, he starts bringing her coffee at the beginning of her midnight shifts, albeit with absurd requests for access to corpses that aren’t available (or even dead). Some mornings, she comes into the kitchen to see him lying on her sofa, baiting Toby with the end of his riding crop, because 221B ran out of tea and Mrs. Hudson is out and he couldn’t be bothered to find a Tesco’s. 

And then there’s an evening when he comes to her door hissing with pain from a bruise on his lower back, and she makes him sleep in her bed because the spare bedroom mattress is murder on anyone with a spine. Before she can leave, he grabs her wrist with a gentle touch of lithe fingers ( _Violin_ , she remembers. _Sad music when he thinks no one’s listening._ ). 

“I can be crass, but surely you don’t think so poorly of my mother to assume I would chase you out of your own bed?” he says quietly, his hand cold on her skin. 

“I didn’t think you had a mother at all, actually, with manners like that,” she murmurs, before sliding between the sheets and finding his bare torso with her arm. 

He shivers at her touch but he doesn’t turn away; he wraps himself around her shoulders and tucks her head underneath his chin, like he used to do with Rosie. He smells overwhelmingly like the menthol of the pain relief cream and the plasters lining his back, but she breathes it in and feels something move into place in her chest. 

Inevitably, other people begin to notice.

Lestrade asks questions first, his eyes shooting from the back of Sherlock’s head to the blue scarf wrapped around Molly’s neck. She drops her bag at her desk and looks at them in outrage.

“Who let you in?” she demands. “I haven’t even signed in yet.”

“I asked Stamford,” Sherlock replies smoothly, not looking up. “You were late getting up this morning, so I took the liberty.” 

She doesn’t have time to deign that response with her ire; Lestrade has started sputtering into his coffee mug. 

“Did you two —” He coughs twice, hacking at what seems to be misplaced coffee grounds in his throat. Finally, eyes watering and face flushed red, he says hoarsely, “Did you two, you know...figure it out?”

Sherlock rolls his eyes and doesn’t respond. Molly just looks at him and shrugs, her mouth tugging into a small smile, and she leaves to go change into her lab coat. 

Mycroft Holmes is not as subtle. 

She’s struggling with her bag of groceries when a black sedan emerges in front of Tesco’s, much to the rage of pedestrians cut off from the crosswalk. A few angry hands slam at the bumper and Molly winces. 

The back seat window rolls down. 

“Dr. Hooper,” a woman says politely from inside the car. “Please get in.”

Molly clocks that this is decidedly _not_ the same woman who visited her all of those months ago, but the door swings open and the woman barely looks up at her as she slides in, so there probably isn’t much use in asking any questions. She fumbles ungracefully with her groceries before the woman looks up at her with an eyebrow raised.

“Sorry,” Molly says meekly.

“My name is Anthea,” the woman says in response. “You should know that. Just in case.”

Molly’s not quite sure how to respond to that, so she nods mutely and settles into the rich leather plush of the seat. 

The car pulls into an abandoned lot for an abandoned warehouse in the middle of the Docklands, and Molly wonders briefly if she’s meant to drag her paper bag filled with milk and eggs and a packet of ham up to wherever she needs to meet Mycroft, before Anthea reaches over and opens the car door for her. “We’ll make sure your things end up where they need to, Dr. Hooper,” she says pleasantly. “Goodbye.”

Molly nods, her stomach sinking with foresight. 

Mycroft is sitting in a hard metal chair in the middle of a room that has wires coming out of the ceiling and a steady drip echoing from somewhere down the hallway. He has never looked more nefarious, not even when he had nodded at her from a window across the street from Bart’s, on the day Sherlock decided to (not) commit suicide. 

“This is a bit much, just for me,” she says. Her tone is surprisingly steady.

“Hardly,” Mycroft says back. His smile is coated with sticky civility, as if he isn’t sitting like a Bond villain who’s just coerced an innocent bystander into visiting his evil lair. 

“We could have just met in the canteen, you know,” she tells him. She hopes the ice cream isn’t all melted by the time it arrives back at her flat. “Or at a cafe. I’m assuming you have my number.”

“I do prize my discretion,” Mycroft says smoothly. “And my brother doesn’t take too kindly to my disruptions in his...ah, territory.” 

Molly can feel her eyebrows rising above her hairline. “His _territory_? Is that what I’m called now?’

Mycroft’s smile shifts to genuine amusement. “And what would you say you’re called, Dr. Hooper?”

Molly’s mouth is open in mild outrage, but she closes it shut as she thinks about the past few weeks, about the line that they’ve seemed to be hovering over since Sherlock showed up at her door smelling like the contents of a pub floor. She hadn’t allowed herself to think about it, hadn’t allowed herself to fantasize or project or name anything, as she would have done for other relationships. Sherlock is Sherlock, and she’s stopped expecting him to be anything more or less. 

“I care about him,” she says simply. “It doesn’t have to be more complicated.”

Mycroft doesn’t respond for a moment; there’s a curious expression on his face. It’s almost a little sad, like looking at an old photograph of someone you don’t really remember, whose memory is a strange, unidentifiable loss. She wonders when they’ve last spoken, if Sherlock has seen this expression on his brother’s face before. 

“I see,” he says finally. He doesn’t comment on anything more, he just looks at her and nods, something drawn behind his eyes. “My brother received something a few months ago, something I didn’t realize was in his possession until recently. He has yet to inform me of its existence, which I find concerning. Would you be willing to ask him for me?”

Molly blinks at him. “Why don’t you ask him yourself?” 

Mycroft smiles, a politely tense expression. “I fear he would destroy the device as soon as I made contact,” he says. “The matter is personal, which often forces my brother towards overreaction.” 

“And this is important?”

“I would not be asking if it wasn’t,” he tells her, and Molly has the sense that this is the most honest thing he’s said since she climbed the stairs to this floor of the warehouse. 

She nods, slowly, her expression still cautious, and she wonders at the level of Sherlock’s anger when she tells him that she’s been unintentionally consorting with his brother. Something in Mycroft’s face tells her that this is important enough to risk his ire, and she’s never been the type of person to ask too many questions — the occupational hazard of working in a morgue.

It is difficult, however, to find the right timing. 

Sherlock disappears for almost a week, hunkered in a cottage in Shropshire after three corpses are found in a nearby well, all strangers to the area with no identification on them. He texts Molly sporadically, asking her to google the legalese of a contested will, and she assumes he’s lost access to wi-fi until he tells her that he doesn’t want to pay the cottage owner for his share. She cuts him off after that, and doesn’t hear from him until she’s in the middle of finding tissue scarring on the liver of one Henri Berger (41, presumed dead from alcohol poisoning, now discovered to be some kind of amatoxin, but she needs to provide a full toxicology report), and Sherlock knocks on the observation window. 

Despite the interruption, she’s glad to see him. 

“Dinner?” he asks as she shrugs off her lab coat. “Chinese?”

“Italian,” she tells him, handing him her scarf to hold as she pulls on her gloves. “Let’s eat at the restaurant.”

“Fine,” he says. He doesn’t take her hand but he sits close enough to touch her leg with his knee in the taxi, texting all the while. 

Angelo eyes Molly when she enters, trailing Sherlock to the corner table. “Where is the doctor?” he asks them, both eyebrows raised.

“In New Jersey,” Sherlock says simply. “This is Molly.” 

The food is excellent. It’s good enough that Molly forgets to ask about the phone; they spend the time shoveling in magical bites of gnocchi and freshly made rigatoni and arguing about the potential decomposition rate of a man preserved in a chemical blend of coffee grounds and different kinds of embalming fluids. At one point, Molly pulls out a photo of a recent intake to make a point, and the passing waiter spills water all over Sherlock’s coat. 

Sherlock waves off the man, who’s grasping at the collars with helpless handfuls of napkins, and he instead pulls out an old Blackberry from his breast pocket. Molly puts down her fork and stares at the device, at its sudden and rampant familiarity.

“You x-rayed that phone once at the lab.”

Sherlock looks up from his examination of the Blackberry. “You remembered?” he asks. 

“Of course. I thought it was your girlfriend’s.”

“A question that’s still peculiar, even to me.”

Molly rolls her eyes but sips her water, smiling. She watches Sherlock run his hands over the keys, turn the screen on and off, and then place the phone carefully to his side, aligning it with the edges of the table. She swallows and clears her throat, her eyes still on the phone.

“So whose phone is it?” she asks casually, feigning a shallow interest. 

He glances up, once, still chewing. “Not my girlfriend’s,” he says simply, before asking her to pass the salt. 

She tries again when they're waiting for a cab outside, her breath coming out of her in waves of steam. She watches it float mid-air and thinks, _a direct approach._

It’s high time she breached the topic, anyways.

“Am I your girlfriend?” she asks quietly. Sherlock freezes, his hand still outstretched in front of him. He drops it to his side and turns to her, his face long and narrow and pale in the cold. A part of her wants to shrivel up and die at the way he’s staring at her, because god only knows what’s running through his head right now. Despite everything, despite the past few months and despite just having dinner and laughing at his plain absurdities and feeling like something has clicked into place, despite despite _despite_ it all, she still waits for him to drop his eyes into a sneer, to scowl in her face and hiss at her about _sentiment._

Instead, he asks, his voice low, “Do you want to be?” 

He steps closer to her, and the street turns curiously silent, muffled by a humming in Molly’s ears. She feels something drop between her eyes and she looks up to see the year’s first snowfall, drifting between the rooftops. 

“If that’s what you need,” Sherlock says to her slowly. She can feel his eyes still on her. “Whatever it is you need, Molly.”

Molly swallows, looking back at him. She lifts a finger, and his eyes flutter closed as she brushes away a stray snowflake caught in his eyelashes. She keeps her hand there, on his cheek, and she smiles at him. 

“I just needed to know,” she tells him. “Thank you.” 

He raises a hand to hers on his cheek, and they stand there in the snow, waiting for their taxi. The light of Angelo’s glows behind them, and she hears the whisper, brushing the nape of her neck, close to her ear, an echo of the thing that doesn’t need to be named anymore, that she doesn’t need to call by something other than just caring, than just Sherlock.

She can feel the way they’ve returned to a place they had never left, and yet it is new all the same, and her heart beats.

_I love you. I love you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I took some liberties with the canon/fanon in this chapter; I know most people assume Mary's parents are dead and that she's an orphan, but after seeing Sherlock + his siblings come from a relatively normal household, I really couldn't see why Mary could also not also have had a normal childhood.


	7. reciprocation

Back before Sherlock returned from the dead, before he appeared in the mirror of her locker and asked her to stand in for John for the first time, before Mary died and before Rosie and before everything else, Sherlock came to her flat.

It was a brief visit, an overnight stay because he was tracking one of Moriarty’s men and he had been away from London for long enough that most of his other bolt holes had been sealed off. He was thinner and dirtier than she had ever seen him, his hair long and his beard a scraggly mess across the lower half of his face. When she found him dozing at the kitchen table with a mug of tea cooling in front of him, she reached for her can of mace and held it in front of her until he looked at her and smiled. 

“It’s been a while,” she said, after he had washed and plastered relief patches across the entirety of his lower back, groaning as she pressed her hand against the bruises. 

“Has it?” 

She stared at the long scar that was drawn across the top of his chest, the way it puckered with uneven stitches. “I haven’t seen that one before. It’s a lousy job.”

The corner of his lip went up but he said nothing, leaning down instead to pick up his shirt from the floor and slide it over his head. “I’ll impose only until tomorrow,” he promised. He paused, his back turned towards her, his gaze pointed away from her own. “This should be over soon.”

She looked at him then, and she didn’t know if she was allowed to ask, if he would even answer. 

When he stood in the darkness of her lab, all of those months ago — had it really been so long? — something in the puzzle between them had shifted out of place, and the entire image was re-illuminated and made new. She knew better than to fool herself and assume that things were so drastically different that she could presume a greater importance, but hope was an uneasy thing. It was difficult to kill, to hold in her hands and extinguish with grim determination. There was so little of it and yet it made it so much easier to breathe.

Molly had saved Sherlock Holmes and killed him in the span of a day. She held his head in her lap and waited for him to wake after he dripped into her flat the first time, all of those months ago, bleeding from a well-placed nick to the femoral artery. She had frozen her entire existence because he came to her in the darkness of her lab and quietly placed his life in her steady hands. In that moment, while watching Sherlock breathe and drink tea and gnash his teeth at the pain of his bruises, watching Sherlock be _alive_ because of _her_ , Molly thought that she had the right to presume. She chose her next question carefully.

“Who’s next?” 

Sherlock stilled, his position awkward against the sinking softness of her sofa. He bent slightly to look at her, the turn of his mouth sharp. She was familiar with the flatness of his face and the imposition of his stare, but his eyes weren’t angry. They were watching — curious. 

“You never asked me before,” he said. 

“I thought I wasn’t allowed. I’m not important enough.”

He sucked in his breath between his teeth, a harsh hissing sound. It was the sound he made when he found a statement so mind-numbingly ignorant that he couldn’t help but wonder if stupidity was a matter of willfulness. 

“Not very many people know that I’m alive, Molly.” 

She didn’t miss the unsaid phrase that came afterwards, which hung in the air and followed Sherlock like a personalized rain cloud. _Not even John._

“Well then,” she said, cornering him neatly. _Prove it. Prove that I’m important.“_ Who’s next?”

She didn’t expect a complete answer; she knew better than that. But as Sherlock muttered his way through a vague description, it didn’t take much for her to piece together the woman with the bashed in face from the morgue, from Christmas Day a lifetime ago, the woman that Sherlock had known from a glance. She had seen the chart afterwards, had typed the name into a search engine. She saw the pictures. 

_Irene Elizabeth Adler, 32, dominatrix._

And now, apparently, not dead.

“She worked for Jim?”

Sherlock glanced at her, an eyebrow going up at her use of Moriarty’s first name. She swallowed and stared back, wondering if it was silly to feel defiant, as if to say, _yes, yes, I was involved with someone dangerous too._

“ _Jim_ was a consulting criminal. She consulted him, and I stopped them.”

“So why are you going after her?”

Sherlock’s lips thinned. He considered her for a moment, a lean finger tapping once, twice on the edge of the sofa. “Do you ever think about him?”

Question for a question. It was getting to be a tiresome game. They played several rounds of it each time he landed back in her flat, some part of him barely snatched from the maws of a collapsing criminal empire. But Molly played it because she was never going to be John; she was never going to ask questions and see Sherlock turn to her with the answer ready before the full sentence had left her lips. He played the game with everyone else; she was everyone else.

“It’s like a box. He’s inside the box, and I put the box in a corner and I normally don’t look at it. But sometimes, he creeps out and I have him there with me, in my head, like something that crawled up my ear.” 

Her voice was soft but she could have been shouting based on how Sherlock was watching her, his eyes rapt. She breathed in and out slowly, her heart thudding in rhythm. “Sometimes, I don’t believe he’s dead.”

It was like Sherlock’s face was moving in two directions, the automatic sneer morphing into a frown. He was not being considerate — he would never be so considerate — but he was realizing something, something that had occurred a nanosecond after his reflexive dismissal of her emotions. 

“Me too,” he said, almost in an exhale. 

If it was any other time, if Sherlock was not sitting in her flat as a non-entity whose death was a matter of record sealed away and stamped by St. Bartholomew’s Morgue, Molly knew he would never admit it. She saw the yearning tucked inside the abject horror of his confession, the instinctual call in his brain toward another mind like his. A part of Molly understood this; perhaps it was why she said yes to Jim, all those many months and weeks ago. 

She tucked away the moment into the back of her head, another one of his secrets for her to keep. “Are you going to see her?” she replied instead. 

He waited a moment before he nodded once, slowly. There was a finality to the gesture that indicated the conversation was over. He looked at her with his face long and drawn in the veiled darkness of her flat, and Molly wondered if he was recalling Irene’s face and drawing it in the air in front of him, the way she did during the long periods when she didn’t know if he was alive or dead. 

A heart chasing after a heart chasing after a heart.

She didn’t mistake the twist in her spine for jealousy. She already knew, she had absolved herself of an emotion like that long ago. Sherlock Holmes was not heartless, but his heart was limited in scope and capacity. There was barely enough room to hold two people, let alone a third. Sherlock would never love her, but that was alright. It would be alright, so long as he never asked for her to confirm her own heart for his sake.

In the morning, Molly woke to an empty silence. Sherlock left behind a handful of pain relief patches and the smell of menthol, and she stared at the cold mug of tea still on the table before calling Tom and saying _yes, yes._

\--

“Did you know before?” she asks him, later, after they take a taxi home ( _home_ , Molly’s flat) and leave behind the golden memory of Angelo’s for something else wrapped in darkness. “Before I told you?”

Sherlock looks over at her, his eyes slanted and pale in the moonlight. They’re lying down and facing the ceiling, heads sunk into pillows, and Sherlock’s breath has stilled into the steady pattern of inhalation, exhalation that marks encroaching sleep. 

“No,” he says, after a pause. She feels the vibration of the bass of his voice, humming through her fingertips. She slips her fingers down and reaches for him, wrapping her palm around his hand. “I hadn’t realized until the island.”

“Figures,” she replies, and she can feel him smiling in the dark. Her heart turns like a planet spinning on its axis, and she remembers Sherlock’s expression when he opened her note on Christmas, when he saw the message she had carelessly scribbled without realizing how she was exposing every painful nerve of herself with the color of the wrapping paper and the mindless care she put into folding its crisp edges. There had been utter confusion on his face, as if he hadn’t known how she felt before then. _Because_ he hadn’t known.

“Do you regret it?” she asks. A thumb ghosts over her hand, brushing down the side. “Mycroft told me. You destroyed the coffin.”

Sherlock is silent, long enough for her to wonder if he has given in and fallen asleep. She closes her eyes and is about to slip away herself when she hears him say, “I regret the island. I regret everything Eurus did, what happened to her. What Mycroft did. But no, I don’t regret knowing.”

Molly doesn’t respond. She opens her eyes and stares at the blackness swimming in front of her, her hand still clutched in Sherlock’s grasp. He shifts and turns away from her, his face on the opposite side of the bed, but his hand is still reached around his chest to hang onto her own. She pulls it to her own chest, her breath warm, and she kisses the palm once. He breathes out, his eyes still closed, and together, they fall asleep. 

\--

In the morning, she fishes the Blackberry out of his coat pocket and hands it to him, and then tells him to call Mycroft. It doesn’t go well.

Their row is nothing short of spectacular — Sherlock’s anger has always been a sight to behold, but Molly’s never had it directed so completely towards her. She’s very familiar with his scathing and contempt, his condescension and criticism, but never his anger; she was never important enough for such incandescent fury, so cold that it could burn her. It almost takes her breath away. 

She sits at the kitchen table, still holding onto the Blackberry, watching Sherlock pace in front of her. He doesn’t call her a traitor or imply that she’s spent the past six months in an elaborate ruse to manipulate him into speaking to his brother again, but he comes close enough that she raises a hand, palm outward, because words aren’t enough and she needs to physically sign for him to stop. 

“Stop it,” she says, her voice so very, very quiet. “Sherlock, you can’t — just stop.”

He goes silent and stares at her, his jaw locked around his anger, and he glances at the Blackberry lying in her lap.

“It’s _none of your business_ ,” he says cruelly. The words are sharpened for maximum effect; they land as intended. 

Molly closes her eyes and tightens her grip around the cellphone, its plastic cover grating against the dry skin of her palm. Against her eyelids, she can see Irene’s beautiful face, the same face she saw and failed to recognize all those months ago, when Irene came to warn her. She sees Irene and Mary and John, and she feels the weight of the losses that Sherlock refuses to carry for himself. 

“I’m not your brother, Sherlock,” she says quietly. “I’m not the one you’re angry with.”

He stays silent at that, and Molly lowers her head, feeling abruptly tired, so, so tired. She presses her hand to her eyes, feeling them cool in the pitch black, and she measures out the next few words, placing them on the table for the two of them to examine together.

“I’m not your brother or John or Irene. I don’t need to be your girlfriend or your lover or anything at all. I don’t have to be important and I don’t need to matter to you; I can care for you and love you and end it there. But it doesn’t mean I bear your burdens so that you don’t have to. You are not the only person to have lost people.” 

Sherlock doesn’t look at her. She breathes out, checks the clock. It’s almost time to leave for her shift. 

“If you’re angry with Mycroft, be angry with him. If you are mourning for the people you’ve lost, then mourn. If you’re trying not to blame yourself and you’re trying to figure out how to pay penance, then do it. I’ll be there with you. But don’t drive me away. Don’t lose me too.”

She rises, places the phone on the table. She walks past the kitchen, past Sherlock, and stops to brush a hand against his arm. 

“Be careful,” she says, and leaves.

\-- 

Sherlock isn’t there when she comes back. A week passes, and then another. She reaches for her phone more than once, wondering if she should text, but his absence is already a reply. If he wants her, if he needs her, he’ll come back. It’s his turn. 

Molly’s brain works in stages. There’s the part at the front of her brain, dealing with the immediate situation at hand. Sherlock isn’t here, and he might not be here for some time. She can still go to work and eat and sleep and breathe like she normally does. It’s normal, he just isn’t here.

The other part of her brain, the one that lurks in the deep recesses of her mind, starts to create potential scenarios. There’s one where he comes back, with flowers and chocolates. They get married and have lots of babies, and then her brain short circuits because, even in her own fantasies, Sherlock could never live a life so mundane. 

In another, he doesn’t return. He finds a flat somewhere else in London, abandons 221B and Mrs. Hudson, and he takes up residence in another morgue. She doesn’t see him again. Could she do that? Could she leave him to his life, to proceed as he wants until he winds up dead in some back alley in the name of drug experimentation? 

Everything else, all the scenarios that exist in between, have too much weight and too many questions. He comes back, but he doesn’t have room for her in the way that he formerly did. She ruined it all. Could she still stay? He doesn’t come back, but she goes to find him. He tells her to go away, even though he’s not okay, even though she’s taken on her duty of care. Could she leave him? 

Liz would tell her that no person is worth the development of an entire risk management plan. Her dad would tell her that Molly has a duty of care. John — well, John gave his answer. He needed to leave. He couldn’t bear it any longer. 

Molly’s deepest fear, the one she holds like an iron ore deep behind the caverns of her rib cage, isn’t that Sherlock will turn away from her in disgust. It isn’t his rejection. It’s her own. She’s afraid that one day, she will leave too. Could she do that to him?

Molly honestly doesn’t know her answer. 

One morning, she receives a text from Anthea. It takes a moment of recall (dark hair, pale face, constantly texting, a black sedan car), and Molly debates on opening what will obviously be a message from Mycroft, placing another impossible demand. 

Instead, it’s a brief cursory note informing her that Sherlock visited Mycroft earlier that afternoon (“barged without warning”) and has been in a meeting with him for the past four hours (“barricaded himself in without food and water”). Given that the brothers, on a normal basis, could barely get past thirty minutes of conversation without devolving into extensive threats of bodily harm, Anthea said she felt that she had a duty to warn the only person in Sherlock’s proximity who might be considered a “domestic partner.” 

Molly had stared at the words “domestic partner” and wondered, with increasing absurdity, if this was how John felt whenever someone took him for Sherlock’s boyfriend. The term was so wildly inaccurate despite being completely and unavoidably correct; she wanted to vehemently deny the term despite not knowing a better word to use in its stead. 

She receives the text on a Tuesday, during the second hour of her 12 hour shift. By hour ten, Mike finds her slumped over her desk, her head leaning against the smooth countertop finish, and he pats her hand sympathetically. 

“It’ll be the weekend soon and you can have it off this week,” he tells her reassuringly, and she wants to cry in insane laughter. There was a time when the biggest problem in her life was a difficult work-life balance. 

“Thanks, Mike,” she says weakly, and he smiles and trots off to mildly scold an intern, and she goes back to trying to stave off her pounding headache. 

It doesn’t matter. What matters, obviously, is whether or not Sherlock is in the process of slowly murdering his own brother in his own office. 

She understands that the Blackberry is only a placeholder for the center of their disagreement (as much as there can be a center to a matted web of years and years of resentment and bitterness and mutual contempt). Sherlock can feign outrage over Mycroft’s interference and Mycroft can demand authority over an item that technically doesn’t exist, but none of it really matters. Sherlock wants to be angry and Mycroft…

She doesn’t know if Mycroft necessarily wants (needs) to be forgiven. But certainly, she can understand that he’s assuming the role of the grown up, trying to herd things back to the status quo. She’s always assumed (hoped?) that Mycroft has more emotional intelligence than Sherlock, that this is what makes him willing to do what he does. Sherlock helps people only as long as they remain interesting to him, but Mycroft withstands the immensely dull and knuckle-headed for the sake of Queen and Country (or so she hopes. He might just be a power-hungry megalomaniac, she can’t be sure). Surely a man constantly displaying his (apparent) capability for magnanimity would retain a similar capacity of understanding for his little brother. 

But then again, they’re the Holmeses. Nothing about them connotes any particular type of benevolence. 

When Molly clocks out and leaves the lab, Sherlock is waiting for her in the hallway. He’s leaning against the wall, a dark streak against the white paint, and she gasps a little before she realizes it’s him. 

“ _Christ_ — oh, oh, hi. Hi.”

He just looks at her, his face expressionless, before he drops his head and shoves his hands deeper into his pockets. “He shouldn’t have involved you,” he says slowly, without a greeting. “That’s why I was angry. Mycroft puts people in danger; he gets them involved. I have lost people because of him. I couldn’t...it can’t happen to you. I won’t let it.” 

Molly doesn’t respond. She stands quietly for a moment, something growing thick in her throat, and she holds her bag and her lab coat in front of her like a shield. Sherlock looks at her, and Molly can feel the fragile weight of the thing between them, as delicate and brittle as a bird’s skeleton. 

The thing between them is both new and old. Molly spent months running away from it, in denial that it existed, that there was any possibility that it _could_ exist. There is a point of passing in one’s desire for something, when the desire has grown so old and weary that it rejects the possibility of being fulfilled. Molly has spent months running for fear of what fulfillment could mean — of what its _loss_ would mean. It’s this fear, and not any fear of the danger or risk that Sherlock presents, that still plagues her. It would be easy to run again, she realizes. 

Before she says anything else, before she can look at him and shake her head, he steps forward, until she and Sherlock are barely a hand’s breadth apart. He traces a finger down her cheek before he bends forward, until his face is inches from hers, and he kisses her.

She stands still for a moment, her arms by her sides, until she feels him wrap himself around her, a hand cradling the back of her head. He kisses her softly at first, and then more urgently, as if he is reassuring himself of her presence, that she is there, that she is not letting go. 

When they break apart, Molly’s heartbeat has slowed to a steady hum. She rests a hand on his jaw, tracing its contour with her thumb.

“Don’t ever tell me whether or not I am involved,” she says quietly. “I _am_ involved, and it’s not up to you. If I leave, it will be my decision.”

He looks at her, his eyes cast down and hooded. “Don’t tell me you’re not important,” he says to her. “Don’t act like you don’t matter. You’ve always mattered.” 

Molly stares back, her heart still beating in its steady, steady staccato. Her brain sorts through the various scenarios it dreamed for itself in the past few weeks, trying to find a match with what’s happening now. It’s not flowers and chocolate, and she doubts there’s any chance of a normal relationship, but Sherlock is Sherlock and he’s here. He came back. 

She leans in, kisses him again, quick and easy. He blinks at her, his face uncertain, and she smiles. She used to think that they were playing a game, that Sherlock’s insistence on a question for a question, a statement for a statement, was a sign of his distrust and her limited importance. Perhaps it was, back then. 

But they speak in reciprocation now; she knows what he’s thinking and he will know her thoughts. She’ll tell him, in due time, her fears and her inability to fully trust in this relationship and the constant, impending thought that this will end, that she will leave. He will tell her his guilt and his losses and his dreams, the ones he has of John and Mary and Irene and Eurus. They’ll hold each other like a confessional because this is who they are to each other, a heart speaking to a heart. 

It is enough.


	8. epilogue

“Male, mid to late twenties, apparent asphyxiation…”

“Apparent?” Sherlock lifts the man’s upper lip with the end of a pencil borrowed from Lestrade and inspects his gums. “Ah, I see.”

He hands the pencil back and Lestrade immediately bins it with one of the forensics, trying and failing to cover his annoyance. Molly catches his eye and grins, but says nothing else. She snaps off her rubber gloves and stands, a hand drifting to Sherlock’s shoulders. 

“Murder disguised as autoerotic asphyxiation, judging by the...well, the set up,” Lestrade notes.

“Poison?” Sherlock asks to his right shoulder and Molly hums an affirmative. 

“Our old friend botulinum toxin,” she says. She can already predict the injection point. 

“You said it’s the third similar case this month?” John asks from the corner. He’s grinning with nervous energy, wearing bags around his shoes and half of a hazmat suit because that’s who John is — respectful, considerate. It’s also been a long time since he’s been back at a crime scene, and Molly can tell that Sherlock is distracted, casting quick glances towards the doorway where John is standing. 

“Yeah, we wouldn’t have called you in if this was the first. Donovan caught the pattern, else we would have knocked it up to some new sex trend or something.” 

“The best and the brightest,” Sherlock mutters, and he looks once at Molly and once at John. “Thoughts?”

“If it’s a serial killer, then she knows what she’s doing,” Molly replies, and Lestrade raises an eyebrow. “She?”

“It could be a man, but given the two other cases, it’s more likely that it’s a woman who was in the same room while he was autoerotic asphyxiating himself — or, probably, having it done to him,” John tells him, exchanging a glance with Molly. 

“Exactly,” Sherlock says smoothly. He takes off his own gloves and straightens, a familiar intensity beaming from his eyes. “So, we need bank statements, phone records. Potentially a sex worker, former or otherwise, judging from the equipment here. It's presumably hers, although it’s been sterilized, wiped clean. Run a match for women with a history of violent crime in the area, someone who looks polished, clean, who would be welcomed into a penthouse flat like this one. Someone who has a history of working in a beauty technician clinic or a medical office. Someone who could’ve gotten close enough to suggest a rendezvous in the past few months, maybe weeks, judging by his level of sexual perversion. Young, beautiful, healthy, psychopath. Shouldn’t be too many of those.”

“Right,” Lestrade nods, pulling out his notebook and scribbling madly. 

As he writes, Sherlock stands with a head cocked to the right, looking at both John and Molly quietly talking in the corner. John swipes through something on his phone and Molly beams, her face glowing as she sees how much her goddaughter is now grown. There’s a photo of her sitting on the porch at the South Orange house with her grandmother, grinning with her new teeth grown in. Another of her in her mother's old bedroom, holding a sunflower next to a photograph of Mary. Sherlock watches, and John's hand shakes only very slightly. 

John still isn’t fully back, not yet. The 221B flat lies largely empty now; Mrs. Hudson calls Sherlock every other week to threaten to rent it out to new tenants if he insists on abandoning it for weeks on end. Molly usually calls back with complacent offers of dinner around their flat and forces Sherlock to drop in for tea at least once a month. 

Neither of them have said anything; Molly hasn’t offered for him to move in officially, despite the steady accumulation of his things in her spare bedroom, her kitchen, her toilet. 221B is a symbolic place, left in stasis, but a piece of Sherlock is still there, just as a piece of John and their life together is still there. Someday, they’ll talk about the incredible financial mismanagement of renting a flat as someone who doesn’t live there anymore. Someday, they'll talk about what it means to live together, what it means to be referred to as a "domestic partner" by his brother's assistant, and then by Mycroft as well. They'll talk about it all, and in some ways, they are already talking about it, but most of it can still wait. For now, John Watson is back in London, and he’s with Sherlock Holmes at a crime scene, solving a case. 

Lestrade finishes jotting down the last of Sherlock’s monologue and looks up, a small smile spreading across his face. 

Sherlock stares at him. “What?”

Lestrade shakes his head, assuming an innocent expression. “Nothing. Nothing. Just...it’s nice to see you back, Sherlock.”

“What are you talking about, I’ve solved the last four of your homicides,” Sherlock snaps, but Lestrade catches Molly and John’s eye by accident and the three of them laugh, a little too sharp and giddy and loud. Molly feels it again, a puzzle piece moving back into place. Things are different, things could hardly be called the same, but that's okay. It's more than okay. The future is no longer a specter. The days are lived in warm sunlight. 

She grabs Sherlock’s hand, too long and too big compared to her own, and she pulls. “Come along,” she says, and he follows, and together, they open the door and step outside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's that.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who's followed this story, and for any and all encouragement — I got to the end because of you. Please stay safe and healthy during this time, and take care of yourselves. You are all important, and you all matter very, very much. 
> 
> Love,  
> Jane


End file.
